15 Quotes by Mark Boyle

Earning money from, and supporting, a system that keeps these people in poverty in the first place and then gives them some of the profits in the form of "strings-attached" aid or World Bank and IMF loans is no more ridiculous than Shell or Esso giving Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth £10,000 to help clear up the destruction that they inevitably cause. Would it not be better not to cause the destruction in the first place?

We're at a crucial point in history. We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, whilst simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water and a stable climate. This generation can have one or the other but not both. Humanity must make a choice. Both have an opportunity cost. Gadgetry or nature? Pick the wrong one and the next generations may have neither.

We are addicted to money and our obsession with it is leading to the destruction of our planet.

If we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn’t contaminate it.

One of the most beautiful ways you can give is giving of yourself and your time.

The more we consume, the more we want. And the more we want, the more we have to work to pay for all these things and insure them and then get stressed about them and protect them and get bigger houses. I think true freedom comes with letting go of them.

When you reduce what you need in life to the bare minimum, then that’s when you achieve true freedom.

I think it’s wrong to think of economics as money. The actual word itself actually revolves around meeting one’s needs. Money is one way of meeting our needs, but it’s only one way.

If there is a danger in the human trajectory it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfilment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.