William McDonough · 193 pages
Rating: (8.5K votes)
“The average lawn is an interesting beast: people plant it, then douse it with artificial fertilizers and dangerous pesticides to make it grow and to keep it uniform-all so that they can hack and mow what they encouraged to grow. And woe to the small yellow flower that rears its head!”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“Ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure...it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an "acceptable" rate.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and system that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“Glance at the sun.
See the moon and the stars.
Gaze at the beauty of eath’s greenings.
Now, think.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“valuable technical nutrients—cars, televisions, carpeting, computers, and refrigerators, for”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“Dow Chemical has experimented with this concept in Europe, and DuPont is taking up this idea vigorously.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“But from our perspective, products that are not designed particularly for human and ecological health are unintelligent and inelegant - what we call crude products.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“But ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure. In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an “acceptable” rate.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“Schumacher posited that people must make a serious shift in what they consider to be wealth and progress: "Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom.”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
“There is some talk in science and popular culture about colonizing other planets, such as Mars or the moon. Part of this is just human nature: we are curious, exploring creatures. The idea of taming a new frontier has a compelling, even romantic, pull, like that of the moon itself. But the idea also provides rationalization for destruction, an expression of our hope that we’ll find a way to save ourselves if we trash our planet. To this speculation, we would respond: If you want the Mars experience, go to Chile and live in a typical copper mine. There are no animals, the landscape is hostile to humans, and it would be a tremendous challenge. Or, for a moonlike effect, go to the nickel mines of Ontario. Seriously,”
― William McDonough, quote from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
William McDonough
Born place: in Tokyo, Japan
Born date February 20, 1951
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“complex system: a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution.”
― quote from Complexity: A Guided Tour
“How many years have passed since that far-off June afternoon? More than thirty. And yet, if I close my eyes, Micòl Finzi-Contini is still there, leaning over her garden wall, looking at me and talking to me. In 1929 Micòl was little more than a child, a thin, blond thirteen-year old with large, clear, magnetic eyes. And I was a boy in short trousers, very bourgeois and very vain, whom a small academic setback was sufficient to cast down into the most childish desperation. We both fixed our eyes on each other. Above her head the sky was a compact blue, a warm already summer sky without the slightest cloud. Nothing, it seemed, would be able to alter it, and nothing indeed has altered it, at least in memory.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“You're allowed to look, sweetheart, he murmured, running a finger down her hot cheek. I enjoy having your eyes on me.”
― Cherise Sinclair, quote from Dark Citadel
“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
“How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose. I don't ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from The Mystery of Edwin Drood
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