Vandana Shiva Thinking Quotations

I think we have reached a stage now where we need to find solutions to economic injustice in the same place and in the same ways that we find solutions to sustainability. Sustainability on environmental grounds and justice in terms of everyone having a place in the production and consumption system - these are two aspects of the same issue. They have been artificially separated and have to be put back again in the Western way of thinking.

Given that I was interested in physics, I think it was easier for me to do physics in India.

I'm a woman, born the daughter of a feminist and the granddaughter of a feminist grandfather. I don't think I could have avoided working on women's issues. I don't do it as a career or profession; it's my very essence as a human being.

I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential.

I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit — profits extracted at the cost of life.

I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

A single, one-dimensional way of thinking has created a monoculture of the mind. And the monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice.

The poorest of families, the poorest of children, are subsidizing the growth of the largest agribusinesses in the world. I think it’s time we recognized that in free trade the poor farmer, the small farmer, is ending up having to pay royalties to the Monsantos of the world.

I do have fun. Even when I’m fighting I’m enjoying it: I think there’s nothing as exhilarating as protecting that which you find precious.

I think the structures of exclusion are more systematically built up in American society, for example, so that young girls interested in science eventually lose their confidence over time. The structures of exclusion work against them. We have other structures of exclusion in India, but not around modern scientific knowledge.

I think we will become disenchanted with the glamour of globalization.