Top 70 Vandana Shiva Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.”

— Vandana Shiva

Featured in: Environment Quotes

2. “The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it’s the next step of peace that we need to create.”

— Vandana Shiva

Featured in: Quotes About Humanity

3. “Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.”

— Vandana Shiva

4. “Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it’s about controlling the world.”

— Vandana Shiva

5. “The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.”

— Vandana Shiva

6. “Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.”

— Vandana Shiva

7. “It’s not an investment if its destroying the planet.”

— Vandana Shiva

8. “Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.”

— Vandana Shiva

9. “In nature’s economy the currency is not money, it is life.”

— Vandana Shiva

10. “Ecofeminism is a good term for distinguishing a feminism that is ecological from the kind of feminisms that have become extremely technocratic. I would even call them very patriarchal.”

— Vandana Shiva

11. “In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She’s the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.”

— Vandana Shiva

12. “Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.”

— Vandana Shiva

13. “That amazing power of being able to stand with total courage in the face of total power and not be afraid. That is stri shakti.”

— Vandana Shiva

14. “Uniformity is not nature’s way; diversity is nature’s way.”

— Vandana Shiva

15. “We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.”

— Vandana Shiva

16. “The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.”

— Vandana Shiva

17. “Food is the place where you begin.”

— Vandana Shiva

18. “An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.”

— Vandana Shiva

19. “I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.”

— Vandana Shiva

20. “We’ve moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now we’re moving from knowledge to information, and that information is so partial – that we’re creating incomplete human beings.”

— Vandana Shiva

21. “Everything I need to know I learned in the forest.”

— Vandana Shiva

22. “When you control seed you control food.”

— Vandana Shiva

23. “The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.”

— Vandana Shiva

24. “Climate change is not just a problem for the future. It is impacting us every day, everywhere.”

— Vandana Shiva

25. “Globalisation has in effect made the citizen disappear, and it has reduced the state into being a mere instrument of global capital.”

— Vandana Shiva

26. “Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature’s gift and denies the poor of their human rights.”

— Vandana Shiva

27. “Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.”

— Vandana Shiva

28. “We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.”

— Vandana Shiva

29. “Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.”

— Vandana Shiva

30. “Seeding the future when possible extinction stares us in the face; seeding freedom when the freedoms of all beings are being closed for the limitless freedom of the 1% to exploit the earth and people, to manipulate life and our minds: this calls for a quantum leap in our imaginations, our intelligences, our capacity for compassion and love, as well as our courage for creative nonviolent resistance and non-cooperation with a system that is driving us to extinction.”

— Vandana Shiva

31. “The time has come to reclaim the stolen harvest and celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act.”

— Vandana Shiva

32. “Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.”

— Vandana Shiva

33. “As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.”

— Vandana Shiva

34. “You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.”

— Vandana Shiva

35. “I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential.”

— Vandana Shiva

36. “Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.”

— Vandana Shiva

37. “I like to live my life so that my loved ones give me the things I need as gifts and I give them the things they need. Frankly a society built around consumerism is hell.”

— Vandana Shiva

38. “We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.”

— Vandana Shiva

39. “My mother taught that if anyone needs you, you should be available to them.”

— Vandana Shiva

40. “The myth of “free choice” begins with “free market” and “free trade”. When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel.”

— Vandana Shiva

41. “Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.”

— Vandana Shiva

42. “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.”

— Vandana Shiva

43. “The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers.”

— Vandana Shiva

44. “The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the few forestry officials who supported them within the bureaucracy. And I was involved with the Chipko movement in my student days.”

— Vandana Shiva

45. “When it comes to owning the seed for collecting royalties, the GMO companies say, ‘it’s mine.’ But when it comes to contamination, cross-pollination, health problems, the response is we’re not liable.”

— Vandana Shiva

46. “The only way to build hope is throuhgh the Earth.”

— Vandana Shiva

47. “In the seed and the soil, we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crises of violence and war. The crises of hunger and disease. The crisis of the destruction of democracy.”

— Vandana Shiva

48. “Amory Lovins has said that the only reason Americans look efficient is that each has 300 energy slaves. Those 300 energy slaves will now be reproduced among the elite of India.”

— Vandana Shiva

49. “We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.”

— Vandana Shiva

50. “The best and most evolved technologies are those that do not destroy the very base on which we live.”

— Vandana Shiva