Top 90 Vandana Quotes

#1. The only way to build hope is throuhgh the Earth.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #37179
#2. You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #97774
#3. Ecofeminism is a good term for distinguishing a feminism that is ecological from the kind of feminisms that have become extremely technocratic. I would even call them very patriarchal.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #126322
#4. A single, one-dimensional way of thinking has created a monoculture of the mind. And the monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #145601
#5. Climate change is not just a problem for the future. It is impacting us every day, everywhere.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #148426
#6. Food is the place where you begin.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #184224
#7. For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #186781
#8. The best and most evolved technologies are those that do not destroy the very base on which we live

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #188691
#9. Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #214591
#10. We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #248514
#11. Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #254348
#12. It's not an investment if its destroying the planet.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #259009
#13. The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #293031
#14. Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #348917
#15. The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #381392
#16. Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #429974
#17. The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #464247
#18. The spinning wheel became the symbol of Indian independence. So we always say, "if the spinning wheel was the symbol of our first independence, then the seed is the symbol of our second independence."

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #507570
#19. In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #525660
#20. It's a phenomenon that started in the United States in which corporations make claims on the life forms, biodiversity and innovations of other cultures by applying for patents on them.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #652822
#21. Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth's resources and living processes.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #678652
#22. In the seed and the soil, we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crises of violence and war. The crises of hunger and disease. The crisis of the destruction of democracy.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #688235
#23. An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #693904
#24. Time is a strange storyteller. It writes, erases and rewrites endlessly. Things change, places and people become unrecognizable, but stories are repeated endlessly

Vandana Shanker

Vandana Quotes #750185
#25. I'm a woman, born the daughter of a feminist and the granddaughter of a feminist grandfather. I don't think I could have avoided working on women's issues. I don't do it as a career or profession; it's my very essence as a human being.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #758971
#26. I've just been told that Nestle has taken out patents on the making of pullao. (Pullao is the way we make our rice in India, with either vegetables or meat or whatever.) Before you know it, every common use of plants will be patented by a Western corporation.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #760465
#27. The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #811506
#28. Something is very, very wrong when people don't have access to drinking water, and Coke creates its market out of that scarcity.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #820709
#29. To create the protection for the corporations, government is actually growing bigger than ever before, in every part of the world. Yet it's growing extremely thin as a protector of people.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #823926
#30. Nature has given us this for free, it was meant to sustain us, we will not allow it to become a monopoly to finance the Imperial Army.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #829899
#31. I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #847372
#32. Given that I was interested in physics, I think it was easier for me to do physics in India.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #873550
#33. When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #905763
#34. It is not an investment if it destroys the planet

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #908843
#35. Amory Lovins has said that the only reason Americans look efficient is that each has 300 energy slaves. Those 300 energy slaves will now be reproduced among the elite of India.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #928486
#36. If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #936007
#37. It is only with local [agriculture] that we can manage the complexity and care that sustainability requires.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #946695
#38. Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #955935
#39. Nature has gifted this rich biological diversity to us. We will not allow it to become the monopoly of a handful of corporations. We will keep it as the basis of our wealth and our sustenance.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #965152
#40. When it comes to owning the seed for collecting royalties, the GMO companies say, 'it's mine.' But when it comes to contamination, cross-pollination, health problems, the response is we're not liable.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #971454
#41. You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #987758
#42. We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1007495
#43. The fact that I still find so much beauty in a handicraft is because my mother taught us to see not just the craft as a product but the craft as an embodiment of human creativity and human labor.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1023213
#44. The myth of "free choice" begins with "free market" and "free trade". When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1046522
#45. We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1049407
#46. Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1052432
#47. When you control seed you control food

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1089643
#48. The fight for truth ... is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1110161
#49. We're still eating the leftovers of World War II.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1119457
#50. We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1139243
#51. The time has come to reclaim the stolen harvest and celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1146734
#52. It is often too late by the time the government reacts.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1147416
#53. American firms are beginning to reproduce nonsustainable systems, to force the elite of India to become energy consumers of the kind that the U.S. has become. That's what globalization is about: Find markets where you can.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1217841
#54. Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1220445
#55. Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1239991
#56. Today the environmental movement has become opposed to issues of justice. You can see this in the way issues are framed. It's a permanent replay of jobs-versus-the-environment, in nature-versus-bread. These are extremely artificial dichotomies.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1285804
#57. Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1300592
#58. Governments have a favorite phrase: "lean and mean." But they've been made very, very fat for corporate interests.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1306832
#59. That amazing power of being able to stand with total courage in the face of total power and not be afraid. That is stri shakti.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1308053
#60. I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1318067
#61. Globalisation has in effect made the citizen disappear, and it has reduced the state into being a mere instrument of global capital.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1329676
#62. Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1349004
#63. As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1371136
#64. I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1378666
#65. Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1381146
#66. The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the few forestry officials who supported them within the bureaucracy. And I was involved with the Chipko movement in my student days.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1392039
#67. Gandhi's idea of swadeshi-that local societies should put their own resources and capacities to use to meet their needs as a basic element of freedom-is becoming increasingly relevant. We cannot afford to forget that we need self-rule, especially in this world of globalization.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1409023
#68. Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1435410
#69. I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1444930
#70. We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1469446
#71. The poorest of families, the poorest of children, are subsidizing the growth of the largest agribusinesses in the world. I think it's time we recognized that in free trade the poor farmer, the small farmer, is ending up having to pay royalties to the Monsantos of the world.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1485848
#72. The agrarian crisis [in India] is an unnecessary tragedy, resulting directly from an economics of greed and a politics driven by the economies of greed.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1519812
#73. I saw brilliant ideas coming out of the [Chipko] movement that needed better articulation, that needed elaboration and systematic analysis. I just followed that and it's been very exciting.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1549888
#74. In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She's the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1570856
#75. Seen from a monocultural perspective, manipulating objects is very, very clever. But seen from a multidimensional perspective, from a perspective of diversity, this is extremely crude because what we have lost out on is a cow that serves as a source of sustainable energy.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1578129
#76. I like to live my life so that my loved ones give me the things I need as gifts and I give them the things they need. Frankly a society built around consumerism is hell

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1585475
#77. I absolutely get thrills from taking on these big guys and recognizing how, behind all their power, they are so empty. I just keep going at it. Each of these balloons does deflate. I've seen a lot of balloons get deflated in my life.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1593368
#78. We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1594362
#79. The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it's the next step of peace that we need to create.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1607622
#80. I think we will become disenchanted with the glamour of globalization.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1613543
#81. The problem of numbers can only be dealt with by recognizing that people have a fundamental right to economic security. If you provide them with economic and environmental security, the population will stabilize itself.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1628533
#82. Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive , most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1635933
#83. My mother taught that if anyone needs you, you should be available to them.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1657183
#84. We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1702266
#85. My training in science is actually one that is very critical of mechanistic science. I was trained in quantum theory which emerged at the turn of the last century. We are a whole century behind in absorbing the leaps that quantum theory made for the human mind.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1749631
#86. I do have fun. Even when I'm fighting I'm enjoying it: I think there's nothing as exhilarating as protecting that which you find precious.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1794957
#87. Democracy ... begins from the ground up. Anything living grows from the bottom up. Everything dangerous, like bombs, gets dropped from the sky down.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1796395
#88. I didn't leave physics because of boredom. I left it because other issues compelled me in a bigger way. And I always say to myself, "When I'm 60, I'd like to go back to what I interrupted."

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1846094
#89. Nobody defines it as something women shouldn't be doing. In a way, there are more mathematicians, more doctors, more scientists in India than there are in this country. We even had a woman head of state, and that's something the United States has yet to catch up with.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1862588
#90. Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Quotes #1864258

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