All Paul Hawken Quotes
We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.
Paul Hawken
54% of people like this quote
The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital.
Paul Hawken
52% of people like this quote
What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability.
Paul Hawken
50% of people like this quote
We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.
Paul Hawken
50% of people like this quote
Businesses who are members of Businesses for Social Responsibility or the Social Venture Network are internalizing costs on a voluntary basis and therefore raising their costs of doing business, but their competitors are not required to.
Paul Hawken
50% of people like this quote
Thus, the forces and value systems that are most threatened by this shift are becoming the most coherent and are rising to the top as minority or plurality powers. But they do not represent either the shift, the change, or the future.
Paul Hawken
48% of people like this quote
The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.
Paul Hawken
48% of people like this quote
We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.
Paul Hawken
48% of people like this quote
Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
Paul Hawken
47% of people like this quote
That inefficiency is masked because growth and progress are measured in money, and money does not give us information about ecological systems, it only gives information about financial systems.
Paul Hawken
46% of people like this quote
That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age.
Paul Hawken
46% of people like this quote
If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic.
Paul Hawken
46% of people like this quote
Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.
Paul Hawken
45% of people like this quote
And also, more and more businesses really want to do the right thing. They feel better about themselves, their workers feel better, and so do their customers. I think this is equally true in the transnational corporations, but it is harder to express in those situations.
Paul Hawken
45% of people like this quote
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