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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“A Strange Eastern Light “During the time of King Herod, Wise Men from the east came and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.’” —Matthew 2:1”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, quote from Unholy Night
“It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years’ time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs.”
― Russell Shorto, quote from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
“I miss sunrise even more. The green scent of dawn in the forest? The color blushing back into the world, different every day.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Blackbringer
“A common enemy is not necessarily a reliable basis for friendship.”
― Brandon Mull, quote from Seeds of Rebellion
“Birthdays were wretched, delicious things when you lived in Beau Rivage. The clock stuck midnight, and presents gave way to magic.
Curses bloomed.
Girls bit into sharp apples instead of birthday cake, chocked on the ruby-and-white slivers, and collapsed into enchanted sleep. Unconscious beneath cobweb canopies, frozen in coffins of glass, they waited for their princes to come. Or they tricked ogres, traded their voices for love, danced until their glass slippers cracked.
A prince would awaken, roused by the promise of true love, and find he had a witch to destroy. A heart to steal. To tear from the rib cage, where it was cushioned by bloody velvet, and deliver it to the queen who demanded the princess's death.
Girls became victims and heroines.
Boys became lovers and murderers.
And sometimes... they became both.”
― quote from Kill Me Softly
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