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Quote by Bill Mollison

“I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.”

Quote by Bill Mollison

Author

Bill Mollison was an Australian author, ecologist, and pioneer in sustainable design. Born in 1928, he passed away on September 24, 2016. Mollison is renowned for his contributions to ecological agriculture and sustainable community design, particularly for co-founding the Permaculture movement with David Holmgren. more

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“I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.”

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“If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.”

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“We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.”

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“I'd come into town from the bush - after 28 years of field work in natural systems - and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.”

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“Humans were my study animal now - I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals. I never listened to what they were saying - I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.”

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“Anyone who ever studied mankind by listening to them was self-deluded. The first thing they should have done was to answer the question, "Can they report to you correctly on their behavior?" And the answer is, "No, the poor bastards cannot."”

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“When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn't write it down fast enough.”

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“Once you've said to yourself, "But I'm not using my physics in my house," or "I'm not using my ecology in my garden, I've never applied it to what I do," it's like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly you say, "If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!" Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill.”

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“Anything that's any good is self-perpetuating.”

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“People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.”

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