Johannes Rau Quotes

We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.

We don't have to sacrifice a strong economy for a healthy environment.

We can be about jobs and growth and be good stewards of our environment.

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

Indeed, the economy and the environment need not be seen in opposition.

Every time we try to do something to improve the environment someone predicts that it will ruin the economy.

I have never believed we had to choose between either a clean and safe environment or a growing economy. Protecting the health and safety of all Americans doesn’t have to come at the expense of our economy’s bottom line. And creating thriving companies and new jobs doesn’t have to come at the expense of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, or the natural landscape in which we live. We can, and indeed must, have both.

We can be pro-growth, pro-jobs, and pro-environment.

We should not have to choose between supporting jobs and supporting the environment.

Economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds. They're opposite sides of the same coin if you're looking at longer-term prosperity.

With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.

The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

Nobody yet knows how to improve working conditions and environmental quality without imposing heavy costs somewhere.

They go together, a strong environment and a strong economy. In Florida the environment is the economy.

This paradigm that says we have to choose industry over the environment or the environment over industry is the old way of thinking.

I agree on the need for environmental sustainability. It is no good raising gross national income while at the same time destroying natural assets.

It would be a mistake to believe that environmental protection and economic growth are mutually exclusive.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

We want to use the environment to shift the way our society works.

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.

In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.

What the Internet was for the 1990s, green jobs are for the 2000s.

It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.

I think today we recognize that economic activity needs to search for ways to protect the environment.