Susan George

“The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.”

“How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.”

“If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.”

“What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.”

“If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.”

“Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy.”

“Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.”

“Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.”

“What's immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.”

“If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.”

“Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.”

“There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.”

“I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this.”

“The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?”

“Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.”

“We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.”

“The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.”

“The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.”

“What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.”

“Subsidize... or lend.”