Top 80 Paul Hawken Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environments and social degradation.”

— Paul Hawken

Featured in: Environment Quotes

2. “Being a good human being is good business.”

— Paul Hawken

3. “Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.”

— Paul Hawken

4. “You are Brilliant and the Earth is Hiring.”

— Paul Hawken

5. “At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”

— Paul Hawken

6. “What a great time to be born, what a great time to be alive, because this generation gets to completely change this world.”

— Paul Hawken

7. “Most floods are caused by man, not weather; deforestation, levee construction, erosion, and overgrazing all result in the loss of ecosystem services.”

— Paul Hawken

8. “Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.”

— Paul Hawken

9. “First we need to decide what needs to be done. Then we do it. And then we ask if it is possible.”

— Paul Hawken

10. “The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous, and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive.”

— Paul Hawken

11. “The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.”

— Paul Hawken

12. “The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy.”

— Paul Hawken

13. “Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.”

— Paul Hawken

14. “The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer.”

— Paul Hawken

15. “What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

— Paul Hawken

16. “This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken.”

— Paul Hawken

17. “Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act.”

— Paul Hawken

18. “Green business is not about tie-dyed T-shirts. It’s about transforming the industrial system itself into one that looks at all the connections.”

— Paul Hawken

19. “If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a heart.”

— Paul Hawken

20. “We are speeding up our lives and working harder in a futile attempt to buy the time to slow down and enjoy it.”

— Paul Hawken

21. “Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.”

— Paul Hawken

22. “Natural capitalism is not about making sudden changes, uprooting institutions, or fomenting upheaval for a new social order. Natural capitalism is about making small, critical choices that can tip economic and social factors in positive ways.”

— Paul Hawken

23. “If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass roots up, not from the top down.”

— Paul Hawken

24. “Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor.”

— Paul Hawken

25. “Luck is earned. Luck is working so hard at your craft, service or enterprise that sooner or later you get a break.”

— Paul Hawken

26. “You can blame people who knock things over in the dark or you can begin to light candles. You’re only at fault if you know about the problem and choose to do nothing.”

— Paul Hawken

27. “While there may be no “right” way to value a forest or a river, there is a wrong way, which is to give it no value at all. How do we decide the value of a 700-year-old tree? We need only to ask how much it would cost to make a new one, or a new river, or even a new atmosphere.”

— Paul Hawken

28. “Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables.”

— Paul Hawken

29. “We assume that everything’s becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that’s true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.”

— Paul Hawken

30. “When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce.”

— Paul Hawken

31. “We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we’re surrendering it all at the same time.”

— Paul Hawken

32. “What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand.”

— Paul Hawken

33. “We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms from landfills to Superfund cleanups, from deep-well injection to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.”

— Paul Hawken

34. “What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability.”

— Paul Hawken

35. “Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.”

— Paul Hawken

36. “We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet.”

— Paul Hawken

37. “Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy.”

— Paul Hawken

38. “It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum.”

— Paul Hawken

39. “Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development.”

— Paul Hawken

40. “The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss.”

— Paul Hawken

41. “I’d rather fail at something important than succeed at something trivial.”

— Paul Hawken

42. “We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital – the resource systems upon which we depend to live – instead of our human capital.”

— Paul Hawken

43. “That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age.”

— Paul Hawken

44. “And also, more and more businesses really want to do the right thing. They feel better about themselves, their workers feel better, and so do their customers. I think this is equally true in the transnational corporations, but it is harder to express in those situations.”

— Paul Hawken

45. “Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.”

— Paul Hawken

46. “People are naming it the Third Wave, the Information Age, etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions, and this next shift is not about technology – although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.”

— Paul Hawken

47. “In short, industrialism is over.”

— Paul Hawken

48. “We are the only species on this planet without full employment.”

— Paul Hawken

49. “Don’t go to business school.”

— Paul Hawken

50. “A local company has more accountability.”

— Paul Hawken