Top 60 George Monbiot Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.”

— George Monbiot

2. “So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed – it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.”

— George Monbiot

3. “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”

— George Monbiot

4. “Rewilding is not about abandoning civilization but about enhancing it. It is to ‘love not man the less, but Nature more’.”

— George Monbiot

5. “Development which has no regard for whom or what it harms is not development. It is the opposite of progress, damaging the Earth’s capacity to support us and the rest of its living systems.”

— George Monbiot

6. “Why is it so easy to save the banks – but so hard to save the biosphere?”

— George Monbiot

7. “When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist.”

— George Monbiot

8. “Thinking like ethical people, dressing like ethical people, decorating our homes like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people.”

— George Monbiot

9. “Change arises from conviction. Stop voting in fear. Start voting for hope.”

— George Monbiot

10. “Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?”

— George Monbiot

11. “We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.”

— George Monbiot

12. “But rewilding, unlike conservation, has no fixed objective: it is driven not by human management but by natural processes. There is no point at which it can be said to have arrived. Rewilding of the kind that interests me does not seek to control the natural world, to re-create a particular ecosystem or landscape, but – having brought back some of the missing species – to allow it to find its own way.”

— George Monbiot

13. “Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.”

— George Monbiot

14. “By rebuilding community, we become proud of our society, proud of our institutions, proud of our nations, proud of ourselves. By coming together we discover who we are. We ignite our capacity for empathy and altruism. Togetherness and belonging allow us to become the heroes of the story.”

— George Monbiot

15. “All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom.”

— George Monbiot

16. “The environmental movement up till now has necessarily been reactive. We have been clear about what we don’t like. But we also need to say what we would like. We need to show where hope lies. Ecological restoration is a work of hope.”

— George Monbiot

17. “The corporations are powerful only because we have allowed them to be. In theory, it is we, not they, who mandate the state. But we have neglected our duty of citizenship, and they have taken advantage of our neglect to seize the reins of government.”

— George Monbiot

18. “Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.”

— George Monbiot

19. “Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.”

— George Monbiot

20. “Faced with a choice between the survival of the planet and a new set of matching tableware, most people would choose the tableware.”

— George Monbiot

21. “I thought of the places I would be leaving, of what they were and what they could become. I pictured trees returning to the bare slopes, fish and whales returning to the bay. I thought of what my children and grandchildren might find here, and of how those who worked the land and sea might prosper if this wild vision were to be realized.”

— George Monbiot

22. “To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love and be loved; to create and to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here.”

— George Monbiot

23. “If global warming is not contained, the West will face a choice of a refugee crisis of unimaginable proportions, or direct complicity in crimes against humanity.”

— George Monbiot

24. “Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.”

— George Monbiot

25. “I could not continue just sitting and writing, looking after my daughter and my house, running merely to stay fit, pursuing only what could not be seen, watching the seasons cycling past without ever quite belonging to them.”

— George Monbiot

26. “In motivating people to love and defend the natural world, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair.”

— George Monbiot

27. “Nobody ever rioted for austerity.”

— George Monbiot

28. “Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters.”

— George Monbiot

29. “Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favour? Well maybe She should have thought of that when She was besetting us with droughts and floods and poisonous snakes. Nature started the fight for survival and now She wants to quit because She’s losing? Well I say ‘Hard Chesse!”

— George Monbiot

30. “There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.”

— George Monbiot

31. “So why is this happening? The answer is like the Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail. When you have followed it all the way round you find yourself back where you started.”

— George Monbiot

32. “To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration.”

— George Monbiot

33. “The amplification of our lives by technology grants us a power over the natural world which we can no longer afford to use. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live as if there were no tomorrow.”

— George Monbiot

34. “Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.”

— George Monbiot

35. “The institutions founded ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ have failed. Since the end of WW2, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians.”

— George Monbiot

36. “Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more.”

— George Monbiot

37. “War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything else goes with it.”

— George Monbiot

38. “The sheep has caused more extensive environmental damage in this country than all the building that has ever taken place here.”

— George Monbiot

39. “The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘cultural hegemony’ to describe the way in which ideas and concepts which benefit a dominant class are universalized. They become norms, adopted whole and unexamined, which shape our thinking. Perhaps we suffer from agricultural hegemony: what is deemed to be good for farmers or landowners is deemed, without question or challenge, to be good for everyone.”

— George Monbiot

40. “Environment’ is a term that creates no pictures in the mind, which is why I have begun to use ‘natural world’ or ‘living planet’ instead.”

— George Monbiot

41. “The failure to tell a new story has been matched by an equally remarkable omission: the failure to discern and describe the values and principles that might inform our politics.”

— George Monbiot

42. “Sheep farming in this country is a slow-burning ecological disaster, which has done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution. Yet scarcely anyone seems to have noticed.”

— George Monbiot

43. “Already, boar are being killed here by the Forestry Commission and other owners at rates that could wipe them out. Among the commission’s justifications is that they cause ‘substantial damage’ to woodlands.17 What does this mean? The notion of damage to native ecosystems by a native species at numbers well below its natural population is nonsensical. What the Forestry Commission calls damage a biologist calls natural processes.”

— George Monbiot

44. “It was when I saw these places in the 1980s that I felt called to do something about it. Seeing the stumps in the peat and the remnant trees, I asked myself: what’s the message in the land? What’s the story it’s telling us? My question was: “What’s Nature seeking to do here?” That is crucially different from the ethos of human domination. Rewilding is about humility, about stepping back.”

— George Monbiot

45. “By rebuilding community, we will renew democracy and the hope we invest in it. We will develop political systems that are not so big that they cannot respond to us but not so small that they cannot meet the problems we face. We will achieve something that, paradoxically, we cannot realise alone: self-reliance. By helping each other, we help ourselves. The strong, embedded cultures.”

— George Monbiot

46. “J. G. Ballard reminded us that ’the suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”

— George Monbiot

47. “Beware of anyone who describes a human being as something other than human being.”

— George Monbiot

48. “People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil which runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos which really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose.”

— George Monbiot

49. “The trouble is that people hate coaches, and for good reason. Coach travel is a dismal and humiliating experience. When I take the bus, as I sometimes must, from Oxford to Cambridge, I arrive feeling almost suicidal.”

— George Monbiot

50. “The beaver is one of several missing animals that have been described as keystone species. A keystone species is one that has a larger impact on its environment than its numbers alone would suggest. This impact creates the conditions which allow other species to live there.”

— George Monbiot