Maxime Bernier Quotes

To ask a country with 750 million people living on less than a dollar a day to optimize their development for the environment as opposed to getting food in the mouths of these people and giving them a decent lifestyle, that's just a little bit too much to ask.

We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for humanity? Who speaks for earth?

We have reached a new milestone as a human family. With seven billion of us now inhabiting our planet, it is time to ask some fundamental questions. How can we provide a dignified life for ourselves and future generations while preserving and protecting the global commons - the atmosphere, the oceans and the ecosystems that support us?

The future belongs to us, because we have taken charge of it. We have the commitment, we have the resourcefulness, and we have the strength of our people to share the dream across Africa of clean water for all.

I'm a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I'm a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied.

If politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.

True security is based on people's welfare - on a thriving economy, on strong public health and education programmes, and on fundamental respect for our common humanity. Development, peace, disarmament, reconciliation and justice are not separate from security; they help to underpin it.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Anything which is a huge problem for humanity we'll sign up for, if we can find a way to fix it.

I also believe that member states of the United Nations should live up their obligations to pay their dues.

If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.

When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.

The Bio-diversity Convention has not yielded any tangible benefits to the world's poor.

We need a greening of globalisation.

If we really wish to put an end to our ongoing international and social problems we must eventually declare Earth and all of its resources as the common heritage of all the world's people.

I mean that the time where we need International agreement more than ever on the environment and the rest, poverty we are breaking up our International Institutions and the rule of law and Tony Blair is part of it.

We will not overcome world poverty unless we manage climate change successfully. I've spent my life as a development economist, and it's crystal clear that we succeed or fail on winning the battle against world poverty and managing climate change together. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.

We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth.

Global challenges require collective responses.

So to hope to be able to have peace, to be able to have justice and environmental balance, are consequences of our behavior, not just our intentions.

This is our world, and we must make the best of it.

The U.N. acts as the world's conscience, and over eighty-five percent of the work that is done by the United Nations is in the social, economic, educational and cultural fields.

In my first book, 'A Return to Love', I wrote about things in the outer world that need to change - how we need to ameliorate deep poverty, heal the earth, end war.

Even if the most ethical people were elected to high position and we ran out of resources, there would still be lying, cheating, stealing, and corruption. It is not ethical people that are needed but rather a way of intelligently managing the Earth's resources for everyone's well-being.

I can't tell the people of India that we'll burden you with high costs because the West has polluted the world, now India will pay for it. Not acceptable to us.