WILLIAM MCDONOUGH

If you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure. People will question your actions.

We achieved our mission to the moon. Let's look home from that lofty perch and reimagine our mission on Earth - that is what we need to do here. Together, we can upcycle everything. The world will be better for our positive visions and actions.

Art is about going a little nuts... Kids do art for fun. It's playing.

Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.

I suggest we take our heads out of the tar sands and look up to see the sun. We don't own it, but it provides us all with great, endless value. So, too, the wind. These free, renewable sources of 'energy currency' are perfect partners to what we own together.

Not everything needs to be recycled.

We get jealous not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us.

I am very focused on large-scale deployments of renewable power and how we're going to get this done. Imagine our military bases covered with solar thermal collectors that could generate steam and electricity.

We are all born artists... Almost everything kids do is art.

I see that idea that we need a new form as something critical. I mean, we do need to invent and not be benchmarking all the time. That's important to me.

I think the job of an original designer is to inspire.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

The eco-effective future of industry is a world of abundance that celebrates the use and consumption of products and materials that are, in effect, nutritious - as safe, effective, and delightful as a cherry tree.

Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.

Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'

I just think it is so delightful to see people, let their elbows free. I think the exuberance of it all is really exciting to me. It's a signal of the abundance of diversity and creative expression.

Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place

Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager's job to "do things right." It is an executive's job to make sure "the right things" get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more "efficient."

Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.

Modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, I didn't intend to cause global warning, it's not part of my plan, then we realize it's part of our defacto plan because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan.

We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.

I am working right at both the levels- with the most wealthy clients in the world, but also the poorest. I spend half my time designing for people that have nothing.

We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?

The problem carbon is that everyone thinks we have an energy problem, we don't. We have plenty of energy. We have a carbon problem. Carbon is a material, so we have a material problem, not an energy problem.

The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.