Quotes About Responsibility

We don't make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.

When the world was ending the first time, Noah took all the animals, two by two, and loaded them aboard his escape craft for evacuation. But it's a funny thing: He left the plants to die. He failed to take the one thing he needed to rebuild life on land, and concentrated on saving the freeloaders!

Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning. Humankind is utterly wrong about the neighbors, and no one can see it. We must repay the world for every idea, every thing we have ever stolen.

And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.

Thank you, she says, following the ancient formula. For all these gifts that you have given. And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, We're sorry. We didn't know how hard it is for you to grow back.

When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don't belong to you anyway. It's not yours to hide.

But the need for justice is like ownership or love. Feeding it only makes it grow.

I didn't know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. I made enough mistakes on any one day to scar him for life. My only hope was that all the errors somehow canceled each other out.

The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man.

And she takes him like someone who's sure that life has need of her.

Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

She would tell him—how the towering, teetering pyramid of large living things is toppling down already, in slow motion, under the huge, swift kick that has dislodged the planetary system. The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man.

By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.

for footprint and understanding.

The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man ... Unless man .

God only knew what the eleven-year-old might confess to me about the things I was right now doing wrong.

Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law. So why shouldn't trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains be able to sue humans for theft and endless damages? (p. 250)

People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air.

That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment.

Apparently God had made life on one planet only, and only one country of that planet's dominant species needed to manage it.

is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them.

It's a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant's: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

For the bitch I was. For the attentive person I wasn't.

Douglas Pavlick works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. 'Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.