Desmond Tutu Quotes

Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance.

The nation’s beauty is every citizen’s duty.

To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up.

With the observable fact that scientific knowledge makes our lives better when applied with concern for human welfare and environmental protection, there is no question that science and technology can produce abundance so that no one has to go without.

If you want to destroy the planet, you can kiss social justice goodbye. The earth comes first.

If you care about the health of the planet, you have to care about the health of its people, and if you really go deeper, it starts with the community of your family.

I'm very much about the environment, I'm very much about health, about being able to, at the very least, eat organic, whole foods that are healthy for us. And then, of course, everyone being able to eat and at least have a humane way to live. There's enough for everybody, but unfortunately, there's a lot of greed and a lot of ego.

Love your fellow man, and take care of each other and your environment.

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter.

To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people's trash.

Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.

The planet is fine. The people are f****d. Because everyone is trying to save the planet. The planet doesn’t need that. The planet will take care of itself. People are selfish. And that's what they're doing is trying to save the planet for themselves to have a nicer place to live.

Environmentalists and clean energy champions should stop telling people that we are working for "sustainability," which nobody understands.

You may ask what kind of a republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just; in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

At the end of the day, we're people and we should fight for each other and we should make sure the well-being of each one of us is taken care of.

While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.

The earth was given to mankind to support the greatest number of which it is capable, and no tribe or people have a right to withhold from the wants of others more than is necessary for their own support and comfort.

Too often we think about the green economy as an elite market niche, one in which affluent people spend more money to consume greener and cleaner products.

We are as much alive as we keep the Earth alive.

If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.

My advice to everybody would be to go out as much as possible and deal with social inequality and environmental degradation because these issues are increasingly prescient.

You know, people have tried to make out there is a split between environmentalism and labor over the years. And if that was ever true, it becomes less so all the time.

I have seen that community and a close relationship with the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible.

I don't want to put the world to rights... I just don't like people who put the world to wrongs.

We're wealthy people. We're sitting here in New York, Washington. We live in a fantastically wealthy country. We don't have to worry about food. We don't have to worry about clothing. We wore the same shirt. We don't have to worry about our safety. It's very easy for us to be environmentalists. It's very easy for me to be an environmentalist. It's very easy for me to care about making sure that we protect the forests and the whales, and all that stuff. It's very hard for someone who makes $1,000 a year or some who makes less than $1 a day to care about the environment.