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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“It’s just this pain, this unbearable mental pain – often it’s your body too, and every part of you hurts. But you don’t really care about your body, it’s your mind. Every thought hurts like hell. Everything you see is awful, twisted, pointless. And the worst – the worst of it is yourself. You realize you are the most ghastly person in the world, the most hideous, inside and out. And you just want to escape, you just want to get rid of yourself, of your suffering, of the pain inside your head. You want to shut out the world and yourself, for ever. A-and death is the only option left because you’ve been through this time and time again, thought and thought about trying to change yourself, the way you think, the way you behave, the way you live. Yet it always comes back to this – the fact that you just d-don’t want to be alive—”
― Tabitha Suzuma, quote from A Voice in the Distance
“I had always found comfort in the leaves, in their silence. They were like a parchment that holds words of wisdom. Simply holding them in my hand gave me some of the peace a tree possesses. To be like that-to just be-that's the most noble thing of all.”
― Silas House, quote from A Parchment of Leaves
“I lock eyes with my reflection and don’t look away. The day you look away you start to lose yourself. I’m never going to lose myself. You are what you are. Deal with it or change.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from Iced
“These were colours he'd never ever seen before; ones he couldn't possibly begin to name. Here, to his left, was a wooden clock, and it was painted, well not exactly green, but a colour that green might like to be if it had any imagination at all. And over there, beside the wooden board game whose overriding colour was not red, but something that red might look at enviously, blushing with embarrassment at its own dull appearance. And the wooden letter sets, well, there were those who might have said that they were painted yellow and blue, but they would have said this knowing that such plain words were an outrageous insult to the colouring on the letters themselves.”
― John Boyne, quote from Noah Barleywater Runs Away
“Are you saying you want to have sex with me this week and only get to ask and be asked ten personal questions?”
“That’s what I’m saying.” His response was dead serious.
“You’re crazy.”
― Vi Keeland, quote from Belong to You
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