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
See more on GoodReads
“Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.”
― Robert McKee, quote from Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
“No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
“I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightfoward pathway had been lost. Ah me! How hard a thing is to say, what was this forest savage, rough, and stern, which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more...”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from La Divina Comedia
“Letting it happen is not making it happen. It is not trying hard.”
― W. Timothy Gallwey, quote from The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance
“The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in,”
― K. Anders Ericsson, quote from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
The White Castle
The Gospel in a Plur...
The Wedding Dress
Beg for Mercy
The Light BearerBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
