Top 30 Susan George Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you cut down a forest, it doesn’t matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.”

— Susan George

2. “The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.”

— Susan George

3. “Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.”

— Susan George

4. “There are a lot of people who don’t contribute anything to consumption and production.”

— Susan George

5. “There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.”

— Susan George

6. “This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.”

— Susan George

7. “It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.”

— Susan George

8. “The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.”

— Susan George

9. “I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.”

— Susan George

10. “I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.”

— Susan George

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11. “Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy.”

— Susan George

12. “Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.”

— Susan George

13. “How do we get democracy at the international level? That’s our problem. and it’s essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.”

— Susan George

14. “I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let’s get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don’t want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water.”

— Susan George

15. “The question is not only what is grown but what it’s used for. There’s not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.”

— Susan George

16. “The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.”

— Susan George

17. “Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.”

— Susan George

18. “What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.”

— Susan George

19. “Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn’t collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.”

— Susan George

20. “What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like.”

— Susan George

21. “As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.”

— Susan George

22. “We have the most crude accounting tools. It’s tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn’t tell us the things that we need to know.”

— Susan George

23. “If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.”

— Susan George

24. “What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can’t even measure yet.”

— Susan George

25. “The World Development Movement, to take just one example, is doing good work. Some political parties are, too.”

— Susan George

26. “Only around 2% of the earth’s surface is cultivatable land.”

— Susan George

27. “Whats immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.”

— Susan George

28. “The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?”

— Susan George

29. “Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it’s much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.”

— Susan George

30. “There’s people coming in who’ve never done any politics at all, who’ve never been in a trade union, they’ve never been in a political party, they’ve never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.”

— Susan George

31. “Everything has to be done to build some sort of international democracy. We’ve seen only the tiniest beginnings of that.”

— Susan George

32. “We’re trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.”

— Susan George

33. “Markets cant think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace.”

— Susan George

34. “I’m a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there’s a great deal of work, and I won’t see the end of this.”

— Susan George