Wangari Maathai Quotes

We tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty. But you can't reduce poverty in a vacuum. You are doing it in an environment.

The goal of my work is to help assure that we can create a world of abundance in which we meet the basic needs of every man, woman and child.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write.

Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.

I wish that every Chinese citizen can live a life of satisfaction, every peasant child can go to school and every person reaching a working age can have a job. I wish people wouldn't have to worry about medical care if they are sick, particularly those in rural areas. I believe that this is the dream of every Chinese person.

The pathway to a more sustainable future for all children must include access to the basic building blocks of good health, including nutrition, water, and immunizations.

The issues of environment, health and education should be taken up vigorously.

We have a moral concern to feed all of the hungry, wipe out malnutrition, so that every American be housed and every child have access to education.

Every economic...acti on must set about providing each inhabitant of the planet with the minimum wherewithal to live in dignity and freedom, with the possibility of supporting a family, educating children, praising God and developing one's own human potential.

We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.

We need human security: food, education, health care for our children.

When a child is starving, a family may not be able to think about long-term sustainability or damage to ecosystems that support endangered species.

One of the reasons why we started the Green Belt Movement is to work with these ordinary peasant farmers so as to educate them that, despite the fact that they are poor, it is in their interest to protect the soil that they have, to protect the forest they have, to protect the land that they have, because if they don't do it, things can be only worse tomorrow for them for them and for their children.

Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy. If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist.

Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?

It can be said that there are four basic and primary things that the mass of people in a society wish for: to live in a safe environment, to be able to work and provide for themselves, to have access to good public health and to have sound educational opportunities for their children.

If we do not save the environment, then whatever we do in civil rights will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction.

In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

School feeding is a great tool to encourage education and provide food aid to children born into extremely impoverished situations. The kids in school being fed by WFP are empowered by their school meal to learn and better their lives!

We can all agree that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, all children should have the basic nutrition they need to learn and grow and to pursue their dreams, because in the end, nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our children... These are the basic values that we all share, regardless of race, party, religion. This is what we share. These are the values that this bill embodies.

Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over - unless we find new ways of producing energy.

Few nations do more than the United States to assist their least fortunate citizens-to make certain that no child, no elderly or handicapped citizen, no family in any circumstances in any State, is left without the essential needs for a decent and healthy existence. In too few nations, I might add, are the people aware of the progressive strides this country has taken in demonstrating the humanitarian side of freedom. Our record is a proud one-and it sharply refutes those who accuse us of thinking only in the materialistic terms of cash registers and calculating machines.