Masanobu Fukuoka Quotes

We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

What's my philosophy? In a word, integral.

I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers.

Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we've solved the problem.

You have to fix everything all at the same time. You cannot deal with one problem to the exclusion of all the others.

One of the biggest challenges we have, as business owners and people, is that we think in linear terms.

When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.

I think very often problems are so big, people approach problems from the bottom up: 'If only I do this little bit, then hopefully there will be some sort of snowball effect that will be bigger and bigger.' I'm much more in favor of the top-down approach to problem-solving.

I am very balanced. I care passionately about people and customers but also about the numbers, and hopefully that view brings something to the party.

There's an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

We have perfected the art of finding problems without fixing real-world issues. We focus too much on complexity, not harm.

Reflection and action must never be undertaken independently.

Treat the world like a head.

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.

Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.

Reductionism is merciless.

Because he treats the world as rather empty and ignores the interrelatedness of all things (so stupefying to thought and action), administrative man can make decisions with relatively simple rules of thumb that do not make impossible demands upon his capacity for thought.

We construct and keep on constructing, yet intuition is still a good thing.

Ask "why" until there is no more "why."

I realize there are few sectors that can do what philanthropy does, which is look at big problems, take a long term view, try to develop strategies for addressing the root causes and then go about solving them.

There is nothing more negligent than attempting to address a problem one finds on a branch than by censoring the leaves.

A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.

Negativity takes no imagination. It's far easier to criticize someone's decisions after they make them than to propose better ones beforehand.

Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.