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21 " The snow was coming down so hard. It looked like the flakes were hurrying to get out of the sky so the next ones would have room to fall. "
― Bill McKibben , Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance
22 " There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being. "
― Bill McKibben , The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life
23 " ...only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others. "
― Bill McKibben , Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks (Crown Journeys)
24 " Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation. "
25 " It's a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives. "
― Bill McKibben
26 " TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't. "
― Bill McKibben , The Age of Missing Information
27 " Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years. "
― Bill McKibben , The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change
28 " Don't be so sure that your version of reality is better because it's newer. "
29 " when confronted by small men doing big and stupid things, we need to resist with all the creativity and wit we can muster, and if we can do so without losing the civility that makes life enjoyable, then so much the better. "
30 " A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope—the only obligation is honesty... "
― Bill McKibben , Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
31 " In the world we grew up in, our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it’s the reflex we’re going to have to temper, and it’s going to be tough. "
― Bill McKibben , Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
32 " we have developed a series of emotional thermostats as well, by far the most potent of which is television itself. instead of really experiencing the highs and lows, pains and joys, that make up a life, many of us use TV just as we use central heating- to flatten our variations, to maintain a constant "optimal" temperature. "
33 " It ensured that I'd never think that patriotism and dissent were opposites. "
34 " We all need to be reminded that democracy isn't just voting for the president every four years and then trusting him to fix things. Democracy is about getting together with your community to think together about your future. "
35 " I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software. "
36 " A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning. "
37 " electronic media have become an environment of their own- to the list of neighborhood and region and continent and planet we must now add television as a place where we live. and the problem is not that it exists- the problem is that it supplants. it's simplicity makes complexity hard to fathom. "
38 " if there is any one subject on which everyone seems to agree, any one point of doctrine to which every political sect subscribes, it's that "economic growth" is the highest goal, our ultimate goal as a country. and not only as a country-as states, as communities, as corporations, as individuals. "
39 " But knowing that moose had returned to Vermont in his lifetime pleased him enormously. It was the idea that things repaired themselves, that if you backed off a little and didn’t ask too much of the world then it would meet you halfway. "
40 " Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question. "