Top 60 George Monbiot Quotes

When expressions of emotion are dangerous, and when you are constantly told that this terrible thing is being done for your own good, you quickly learn to hide your true feelings, even from yourself.

Humans, the supremely social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb, for good or ill, the influences that surround us.

I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn’t change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.

Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly, and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.

David Cameron’s government criminalised squatting in empty homes. This too was previously a civil matter. Thousands of homeless people found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Some have been imprisoned for using property abandoned by its owners.

On my first night at boarding school, I felt entirely alone. I was shocked, frightened and intensely homesick, but I soon discovered that expressing these emotions, instead of bringing help and consolation, attracted a gloating, predatory fascination.

Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible.

If I could turn back the clock, magically deleting my prostate cancer, the surgery I needed and its complications, would I do so? It seems an odd question. But I find it surprisingly hard to answer.

Rather than allowing Roma, Travellers and homeless people to be picked off, all those of us who fear the criminalisation of trespass should join forces with them, protecting their rights while we defend our own.

We urgently need more trees, but we appear to believe that the only means of restoring them is planting. We have a national obsession with tree planting, which is in danger of becoming as tokenistic as bamboo toothbrushes and cotton tote bags.

When you are diagnosed with prostate cancer, your condition is ranked on the Gleason Score, which measures its level of aggression. Mine is graded at seven out of 10. But this doesn’t tell me where I stand in general.

We have a wider political and economic system in which ancient, landed power still carries immense weight. There is nothing some landowners would like more than to set the police on those who dare to venture into their vast estates.

As Dutch elm disease spread across Britain in the 1970s, the country fell into mourning. When the sentinel trees that framed our horizons were felled, their loss was a constant topic of sad and angry conversation.

New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.

Pedestrians and cyclists are squeezed by planners into narrow and often dangerous spaces – the afterthoughts of urban design.

The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

There is plenty of housing – for the rich. But a series of outrageous policies ensure that it remains inaccessible to the poor.

Emotionally damaged men all too often rip apart their own lives, and those of their partners and children. I see both physical fitness and emotional strength as virtues, but they are acquired by entirely different means.

I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.

In talking about my cancer with family and friends, I feel the love that I know will get me through this. The old strategy of suffering in silence could not have been more misguided.

When I kayak in Cardigan Bay, in Wales, what I hope to find above all else is dolphins. Sometimes I do, and these days are the waymarks of my life.

It doesn’t matter how many solar panels you install if you don’t simultaneously shut down coal and gas burners.

If our grazing land was allowed to revert to natural ecosystems, and the land currently used to grow feed for livestock was used for grains, beans, fruit, nuts and vegetables for humans, this switch would allow the UK to absorb an astonishing quantity of carbon.

We are often told that curtailing the freedom of business is coercive and undemocratic. But by what democratic principle should corporations and billionaires decide the fate of current and future generations? When a government releases them from regulation, it allows them to determine whether other people live or die.

While some livestock farms are much better than others, there are none in this country that look like natural ecosystems. Nature has no fences.

If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don’t invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.

What I love about natural climate solutions is that we should be doing all these things anyway. Instead of making painful choices and deploying miserable means to a desirable end, we can defend ourselves from disaster by enhancing our world of wonders.

Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing.

In politics, almost everywhere we see what looks like the externalisation of psychic wounds or deficits.

If we want to prevent both climate and ecological catastrophes, the key task is to minimise the amount of land we use to feed ourselves, while changing the way the remaining land is farmed. Instead, governments almost everywhere pour public money into planetary destruction.

What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others.

As some of us can testify, the viciousness of the lobby groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, and the publications that amplify their message, knows no limits. As we have already seen, they treat even children as fair game.

Yes, the car is still useful – for a few people it’s essential. It would make a good servant. But it has become our master, and it spoils everything it touches.

As SUVs are higher and heavier, they are more likely to kill the people they hit. Driving an SUV in an urban area is an antisocial act.

There’s nothing good about ash dieback, but there is one useful thing that could be done: wherever possible, leave the dead trees to stand. There is more life in a dead tree than in a living tree: around 2,000 animal species in the UK rely on dead or dying wood for their survival.

The justification for early boarding is based on a massive but common misconception. Because physical hardship in childhood makes you physically tough, the founders of the system believed that emotional hardship must make you emotionally tough. It does the opposite.

If we stop dragging trawls and dredges through it, the life of the seas would recover with astonishing speed. Because most marine animals are highly mobile during at least one stage of their development, the rewilding of the seas needs little help from humans.

I have tried to keep my eco-anxiety at bay, to box it into my working life. But every month this becomes more difficult. The rising sense of panic I feel is entirely rational; we should all be feeling it. But we can’t live with it through every hour of every day.

The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.

Wildlife film-makers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict.

The age-old mistake, which has stunted countless lives, is the assumption that because physical hardship in childhood makes you physically tough, emotional hardship must make you emotionally tough.

After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.

A large body of literature suggests that wellbeing is intimately linked to attachment – not only to other people, but also to the natural world.

One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.

Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it.