Janet McNeill

1. “Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?” – George Monbiot

2. “Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it’s the only thing.” – Albert Schweitzer

3. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – Dr. Seuss (from his book The Lorax)

4. “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” – Kahlil Gibran

5. “In any case, community is not about perfect people. It is about people who are bonded to each other, each of whom is a mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, love and hate.” – Jean Vanier

6. “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.” – Sign on church billboard

7. “Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it.” – Tori Amos

8. “Fossil fuels may be a finite resource, but our human psychic potential is infinite.” – Janet McNeill

9. “Almost anything you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” – Mahatma Gandhi

10. “What the world needs now is gratitude. We must begin by learning what it means to have enough. We need to feel gratitude for having been born on a planet so rich in nature, and gratitude for the water that makes our life possible. Do we really know how wonderful it is to be able to breathe a big breath of clean air? If you open your eyes, you will see that the world is full of so much that deserves your gratitude.” – Dr. Masaru Emoto, pg. 81, The Hidden Messages in Water

11. “Care of the soil and care of the soul are not separate things.” ~ Satish Kumar, NOFA Summer Conference, August 2005. From: Sharing the Harvest – A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture, by Elizabeth Henderson (with Robyn Van En).

12. “All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.” – Richard Rohr

13. “Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.” – Joanna Macy & Molly Young Brown in Coming Back to Life – Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (New Society Publishers, 1998).

14. “It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society.” — J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

15. “If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open up to the web of life that called us into being.” – Joanna Macy

16. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” – Douglas Adams

17. “The magic is inside you. There ain’t no crystal ball.” – Dolly Parton

18. “I know what the greatest cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.” ~ Henry Miller

19. “If ever there comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of [hu]mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never seen.” – Matthew Arnold, quoted in Utne magazine

20. “It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, but it is not possible to find it elsewhere.” – Agnes Repplier

21. “Some people think it’s holding on that makes one strong. Sometimes it’s letting go.” – Sylvia Robinson

22.“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” ~ William Blake

23. “Nature is God made visible. Nature is God known through our senses. When we love and serve Nature, we are worshiping the Supreme Being.” ~ Amma (H.H. Mata Amritanandamayi)

24. “When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” ~ Tuli Kupferberg

25. “The world we have created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

26. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life . . . No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.” - Helen Keller

27. “A dead end is just a good place to turn around.” - Naomi Judd

28. “There is only one courage, and that is the courage to go on dying to the past. Not to collect it, not to accumulate it, not to cling to it. We all cling to the past, and because we cling to it we become unavailable to the present.” – Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

29. “You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.” – Flonda Scott Maxwell

30. “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.” – Audre Lourde, 1934-92

31. “The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called ‘hocma’ - the science of the heart…..the capacity to see….to feel….and then to act…as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.” - Journalist Bill Moyers

32. “As for experts, some of my best friends are experts. There are good experts and bad experts, but no one should trust any of them. Environmentalism will succeed or fail on the strength of its legions of amateurs.” – Robert Paehlke

33. “You can blame people who knock things over in the dark, or you can begin to light candles. You’re only at fault if you know about the problem and choose to do nothing.” – Paul Hawken

34. “That older and greater church to which I belong: the church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice…” – George Bernard Shaw

35. “The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house.” – Audre Lourde

36. “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” – Marshall McLuhan

37. “Only when the last tree has died…and the last river has been poisoned…and the last fish has been caught…will we realize that we cannot eat money.” 19th century Cree saying

38. “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.” - Edmund Burke

39. “There is not a problem with the system. The system is the problem.” – Source unknown

40. “Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.” – Karen Kaiser Clark

41. “All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.” – Richard Rohr

42. “The essence of motherhood is not restricted to women who have given birth; it is a principle inherent in both women and men. It is an attitude of the mind. It is love – and that love is the very breath of life. No one would say, ‘I will breathe only when I am with my family and friends; I won’t breathe in front of my enemies.’ Similarly, for those in whom motherhood has awakened, love and compassion for everyone are as much a part of their being as breathing.” – Amma Chi, also known as Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi [Mothers' Day, May 10/09]

43. “We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.” – Thomas Berry in The Great Work - Our Way into the Future

44. “E.L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.” – Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird - Some Instructions on Writing and Life

45. “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait ‘til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” – Thomas Edison (1847–1931)

46. “The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.” – Wendell Berry

47. “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” – Arundhati Roy

48. “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.” – Joanna Macy

49. “We are privileged, and the duty of privilege is absolute integrity.” – John O’Donohue, Irish poet, philosopher and former priest

50. “Normal is someone you don’t know very well.” - Anonymous (quoted in Elisabeth Lesser’s book Broken Open - How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow).

51. “But now comes the daunting revelation, that we are all called to be saints – not good necessarily, or pious or devout – but saints in the sense of just caring for each other.” – Joanna Macy in World as Lover, World as Self

52. “A citizen of an advanced industrialized nation consumes in six months the energy and raw materials that have to last the citizen of a developing country his entire lifetime.” - Maurice Strong

53. “God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you. You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding. I can’t find you in the sentimentalism of religion. You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain.” - Adolfo Quezada’s prayer

54. “When there is a bend in the road, the only ones who crash are those who refuse to change direction.” ~ Source unknown

55. “Energy always flows either toward hope, community, love, generosity, mutual recognition, and spiritual aliveness or it flows toward despair, cynicism, fear that there is not enough, paranoia about the intentions of others, and a desire to control.” ~ Michael Lerner, quoted in “The Great Turning – From Empire to Earth Community,” by David Korten

56. “Telling the truth is ‘like making oxygen.’” – Joanna Macy

57. “Truth comes only to those who must have it, who want it badly enough. And gifts of healing come only to those willing to change.” – Doris Janzen Longacre in the Foreword of her book “Living More with Less”

58. “A human being is a part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~ Albert Einstein, quoted in ‘The Great Turning – From Empire to Earth Community,’ by David Korten

59. “It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it — and I do and always have — then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.” ~ May Sarton

60. “It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to evolutionary and psychological transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells.” ~ Joanna Macy

61. “It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty – and said, ‘Do the best you can do with these, they will have to do.’ And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.” ~ Anne Lamott, from Traveling Mercies – Some Thoughts on Faith

62. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

63. “A clear conscience is more valuable than wealth.” – Filipino proverb

64. “A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.” – Franz Kafka

65. Thomas Berry on the environmental crisis: “It is something like being in a lifeboat. There may be problems of distribution of food, there may be people that need medical care, but if something happens to the boat, the boat has to be taken care of immediately or else everything else becomes irrelevant.”

66. “To move the world, we must first move ourselves.” – Socrates

67. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin

68. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

69. “Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone: it has to be made like bread, remade all the time, made new.” – Ursula K. LeGuin

70. “Changing the world – ready or not!” – Julia Butterfly Hill, famous for tree-sitting & her book The Legacy of Luna – The Story of a Tree, A Woman, & the Struggle to Save the Redwoods

71. “The criteria for success: you are free, you live in the present moment, you are useful to the people around you, and you feel love for all humanity.” – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

72. “Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. It must ensue. And it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.” – Victor Frankl

73. “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” – Mother Teresa

74. “Character is defined by what you are willing to do when the spotlight has been turned off, the applause has died down, and no one is around to give you credit.” – Source unknown

75. “Life is the ultimate teacher, but it is usually through experience and not scientific research that we discover its deepest lessons. A certain percentage of those who have survived near-death experiences speak of a common insight which afforded a glimpse of life’s basic lesson plan. We are all here for a single purpose: to grow in wisdom and to learn to love better. We can do this through losing as well as through winning, by having and by not having, by succeeding or failing. All we need to do is to show up openhearted for class. So fulfilling life’s purpose may depend more on how we play than what we are dealt.” ~ Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., in ‘Kitchen Table Wisdom – Stories that Heal’

76. “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.” – Raymond Williams

77. “Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something.” – Carl Sagan, astronomer (1934 – 1996).

78. “The universe oozes with power, waiting for anyone who wishes to embrace it.” – Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, author of The Universe is a Green Dragon, quoted in Matthew Fox’s The Coming of the Cosmic Christ – The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (Pg. 40)

79. “What’s important is not what’s gone, but what remains.” ~ from the film ‘Home: A Hymn for the Planet’

80. “The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.” – Thomas Henry Huxley

81. “So-called global warming is just a secret ploy by wacko tree-huggers to make America energy-independent, clean our air and water, improve fuel-efficiency of our vehicles, kickstart 21st century industries, and make our cities safer and more livable. Don’t let them get away with it!” – Chip Giller, founder of Grist.org

82. “If the people lead, eventually, the leaders will  follow.” – Source unknown

83. “The message, so firmly, is – don’t give up. Don’t hang with the cynics, the angry-hearted, the whiners, the blamers, the negative minded. Hang with those who believe in love, hope, and beauty – and then work with them to make this a reality. This is our planet. This is our time. This is our call to action.” Guy Dauncey, author of ‘The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming’

84. “…you also know that each action undertaken with pure intent has repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern.” - Joanna Macy in World As Lover, World as Self - Courage for Global Justice & Ecological Renewal.

85. “A patriot must be willing to defend his country from his government.” – Edward Abbey

86. “Don’t fight forces, use them.” – Buckminster Fuller

87. “Once more let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt – it may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.” ~ Tommy Douglas

88. “Why should we all use our creative power? … Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.” ~ Brenda Ueland (American writer, 1891-1985)

89.  “The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” – Victor Frankl

90. “A citizen’s job is to keep his mouth open.” – Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop

91. “Just to live is holy. To be is a blessing.” – Rabbi Abraham Heschel

92. “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.” – Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth - Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

93. “The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our life.” – Alice Miller, 20^th-century therapist & writer

94. “When there’s a bend in the road, the only ones who crash are those who refuse to change direction.” ~ Source unknown

95. “I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul that is more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.” – Barry Lopez

96. “When the Earth has been ravaged and the animals are dying, a tribe of people from all races, creeds and colours will put their faith in deeds, not words, to make the land green again. They will be called ‘Warriors of the Rainbow,’ protectors of the environment.” – Native saying

97. “It’s one of the secrets of the world. We all have the key to one another’s locks. But until we start to talk, we don’t know it.” – Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s ‘Bookworm’ radio show

98. “Even after all this time, The sun never says to the earth, ’You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.”~ Háfiz, from ‘The Gift’

99. “Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.” ~ Robert F. Kennedy, in a speech in Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966.

100. “…as the Buddha told his cousin Ananda, the whole of the holy life is good friends. Our relationships – and our love – are ultimately what give depth and meaning to our lives.” – Joan Halifax in Being with Dying – Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death.

101. “The privilege of a lifetime is to be who you are.” – Joseph Campbell

102. “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning of life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth”

103. “The return from your work must be the satisfaction that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get.” – W.E.B. DuBois

104. “A woman’s body is (a human being’s) first environment. Whatever contaminants are in a woman’s body find their way into the next generation. I think there is no better argument for the precautionary principle.” – Dr. Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream – An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment

105. “A voice is a human gift. It should be cherished & used. Powerlessness & silence go together.” – Margaret Atwood

106. “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” – Thomas Sowell

107. “Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.” – Joseph Campbell, quoted in the biography “A Fire in the Mind – The Life of Joseph Campbell” by Stephen & Robin Larsen

108. “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ~ Harold Whitman

109. “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~ Joseph Campbell, US folklorist & expert on mythology (1904 - 1987)

110. “The purpose of life is not to be happy – but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.” ~ Leo Rosten

111. “I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.” – Alice Walker, writer (1944- )

112. “First we need to decide what needs to be done. Then we do it. And then we ask if it is possible.” - Paul Hawken, quoted by Lester Brown.

113. “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.” – Abraham Lincoln

114. “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.” – Audre Lourde, 1934-92

115. “This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.” – Terry Tempest Williams, naturalist & author

116. “All things are possible, once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake.” – Norman Cousins

117. “If a book doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?” – Alice Walker

118. “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” – Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, exiled Russian novelist, quoted in Yes! (Winter 2002) – Utne Nov-Dec 2002

119. “Conflict is everywhere: water hitting rock, teachers pushing students to learn, or wolves trying to coexist with ranchers. It is our call to evolve. It challenges us to look beyond our current views to an expanded reality. It is a relentless teacher that asks us to see unity where before we found opposites.” – Deidre Combs, mediation specialist, quoted in ‘Sacred Journey’ (Feb/March 2005) – quoted in Utne Reader May/June 2005

120. “Expect nothing; live frugally on surprise.” – Alice Walker

121. “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” – Albert Einstein