Vandana Shiva Quotes (87) Spiritual Sayings
About the Author: Vandana Shiva (Hindi: born 5 November 1952) is an Indian scholar, environmental activist and anti-globalization author. Shiva, currently based in Delhi, has authored more than twenty books. She is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization (along with Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Rifkin, et al.), and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement. She has argued for the wisdom of many traditional practices, as is evident from her interview in the book Vedic Ecology (by Ranchor Prime) that draws upon India's Vedic heritage. She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. She is also a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society. She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, and numerous other prizes.See website for more info - http://vandanashiva.com
###################################
You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
― Vandana Shiva
“In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.”
― Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace
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.
― Vandana Shiva
We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.
― Vandana Shiva
The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it's the next step of peace that we need to create.
― Vandana Shiva
We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.
― Vandana Shiva
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.
― Vandana Shiva
Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.
― Vandana Shiva
In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.
― Vandana Shiva
Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.
― Vandana Shiva
Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world.
― Vandana Shiva
Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.
― Vandana Shiva
You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.
― Vandana Shiva
I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.
― Vandana Shiva
We've moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now we're moving from knowledge to information, and that information is so partial – that we're creating incomplete human beings.
― Vandana Shiva
The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.
― Vandana Shiva
It's not an investment if its destroying the planet.
― Vandana Shiva
If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.
― Vandana Shiva
The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
― Vandana Shiva
Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
― Vandana Shiva
Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights.
― Vandana Shiva
The only way to build hope is throuhgh the Earth.
― Vandana Shiva
I think we will become disenchanted with the glamour of globalization.
― Vandana Shiva
I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.
― Vandana Shiva
It is time to learn from the mistakes of monocultures of the mind and the essentialising violence of reductionist thought. It is time to turn to diversity for healing.
― Vandana Shiva
The kind of capitalism we are seeing today under this expansion of property into living resources is a whole, new, different phase of capitalism. It is totally inconsistent with democracy as well as with sustainability. What we have is capital working on a global scale, totally uprooted, with accountability nowhere, with responsibility nowhere, and with rights everywhere. This new capital, with absolute freedom and no accountability, is structurally anti-life, anti-freedom.
― Vandana Shiva
When you don't take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage.
― Vandana Shiva
Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
― Vandana Shiva
Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.
― Vandana Shiva
I absolutely get thrills from taking on these big guys and recognizing how, behind all their power, they are so empty. I just keep going at it. Each of these balloons does deflate. Ive seen a lot of balloons get deflated in my life.
― Vandana Shiva
If you read Wall Streets reports, they dont talk of soya bean as originating in China. They dont talk of soya bean as soya bean. They talk of Monsanto soya. Monsanto soya is protected by a patent. It has a patent number. It is therefore treated as a creation of Monsanto, a product of Monsantos intelligence and innovation.
― Vandana Shiva
As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
― Vandana Shiva
Patriarchy is based on appropriating rights and leaving responsibility to others.
― Vandana Shiva
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.
― Vandana Shiva
Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive , most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.
― Vandana Shiva
When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.
― Vandana Shiva
We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.
― Vandana Shiva
The environmental movement can only survive if it becomes a justice movement. As a pure environmental movement, it will either die, or it will survive as a corporate 'greenwash'. Anyone who's a sincere environmentalist can't stand that role.
― Vandana Shiva
My mother taught that if anyone needs you, you should be available to them.
― Vandana Shiva
Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.
― Vandana Shiva
We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.
― Vandana Shiva
The poorest of families, the poorest of children, are subsidizing the growth of the largest agribusinesses in the world. I think its 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.
― Vandana Shiva
The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.
― Vandana Shiva
We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.
― Vandana Shiva
There is now a patent restricting the use of an herb called philantis neruri for curing jaundice. An even more blatant example is the use of turmeric for healing wounds, which is something every mother and grandmother does in every home in India. Now the Mississippi Medical Center claims to have "invented" the capacity of turmeric to heal wounds.
― Vandana Shiva
We have a very old conservation movement, particularly in the United States, which has focused on campaigns to protect endangered species: the spotted owl, the old-growth forest. But usually it stops there. To me, biodiversity is the full spectrum. Species conservation is not only about wilderness conservation. Its also about protecting the livelihood of people even while changing the dominant relationship that humans have had with other species. In India, its an economic issue, not just an ecological one.
― Vandana Shiva
American firms are beginning to reproduce nonsustainable systems, to force the elite of India to become energy consumers of the kind that the U.S. has become. Thats what globalization is about: Find markets where you can.
― Vandana Shiva
My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy.
― Vandana Shiva
We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.
― Vandana Shiva
It is not an investment if it destroys the planet
― Vandana Shiva
Everything I need to know I learned in the forest
― Vandana Shiva
I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology.
― Vandana Shiva
I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didnt even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of womenof embryos, of eggs, of bodiesby a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasnt freedom from men but total control by men.
― Vandana Shiva
I do have fun. Even when Im fighting Im enjoying it: I think theres nothing as exhilarating as protecting that which you find precious.
― Vandana Shiva
One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasnt there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed.
― Vandana Shiva
When the wilderness movement emerged, it emerged separate from the issue of social inequality and the economic problems of survival. It was a preservationist ecology movement created by an occupying culture. Clearly, a wilderness movement started by Native Americans would not have had the same roots.
― Vandana Shiva
Food is the place where you begin.
― Vandana Shiva
It is only with local [agriculture] that we can manage the complexity and care that sustainability requires.
― Vandana Shiva
The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
― Vandana Shiva
I like to live my life so that my loved ones give me the things I need as gifts and I give them the things they need. Frankly a society built around consumerism is hell
― Vandana Shiva
In the seed and the soil, we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crises of violence and war. The crises of hunger and disease. The crisis of the destruction of democracy.
― Vandana Shiva
When you control seed you control food
― Vandana Shiva
Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics.
― Vandana Shiva
We're living in the anthropocene age and now human beings will be the shapers of our future, that totally control the overall functions of not just our planet, but our relationship with other planets.
― Vandana Shiva
In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!
― Vandana Shiva
Today the environmental movement has become opposed to issues of justice. You can see this in the way issues are framed. It's a permanent replay of jobs-versus-the-environment, in nature-versus-bread. These are extremely artificial dichotomies.
― Vandana Shiva
Nature has gifted this rich biological diversity to us. We will not allow it to become the monopoly of a handful of corporations. We will keep it as the basis of our wealth and our sustenance.
― Vandana Shiva
The spinning wheel became the symbol of Indian independence. So we always say, "if the spinning wheel was the symbol of our first independence, then the seed is the symbol of our second independence."
― Vandana Shiva
I saw brilliant ideas coming out of the [Chipko] movement that needed better articulation, that needed elaboration and systematic analysis. I just followed that and it's been very exciting.
― Vandana Shiva
My father had been a forester and I had grown up on those hills. I had seen forests and streams disappear. I jumped into Chipko movement and started to work with the peasant women. I learned from them about what forests mean for a rural woman in India in terms of firewood and fodder and medicinal plants and rich knowledge.
― Vandana Shiva
When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.
― Vandana Shiva
I still can't figure out what inspired me to do physics. But since I was nine or ten years old, I wanted to be like [Albert] Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn't even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.
― Vandana Shiva
Given that I was interested in physics, I think it was easier for me to do physics in India.
― Vandana Shiva
My travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. They are not really different, except that there is an added dimension of seeing ecological destruction and seeing the very life-support system that makes us survive on this planet being destroyed. That makes me do more than just inquire; it compels me to act and to intervene.
― Vandana Shiva
Nobody defines it as something women shouldn't be doing. In a way, there are more mathematicians, more doctors, more scientists in India than there are in this country. We even had a woman head of state, and that's something the United States has yet to catch up with.
― Vandana Shiva
I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on.
― Vandana Shiva
I didn't leave physics because of boredom. I left it because other issues compelled me in a bigger way. And I always say to myself, "When I'm 60, I'd like to go back to what I interrupted."
― Vandana Shiva
The people who see the population explosion in the Malthusian way - as a geometric progression - forget that population growth is not a biological issue. People are not increasing in numbers out of stupidity and ignorance. Population growth is an ecological phenomenon linked very intimately to other issues, such as the usurpation of the resources which allow people to live.
― Vandana Shiva
It's worse than slave trade because what is being traded is the very knowledge that makes survival possible for 80 percent of the people of this world. These 80 percent live on the biodiversity and the knowledge they have evolved as part of a rich collective heritage involving the use of seeds for growing crops and medicinal plants for healing.
― Vandana Shiva
The enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons in this way is a real threat to the future of people everywhere because it creates a situation where common practices that have been part of people's lives for generations become monopolies of a handful of pharmaceutical, agribusiness and agrichemical corporations. People then become incapable of looking after their own needs.
― Vandana Shiva
One of the movements we have developed is to say that, just as intellectual property rights protect the inventions of individuals, common rights are needed to protect the common intellectual heritage of indigenous peoples. These are rights that are recognized through the Convention on Biological Diversity. We are working to make sure that they become foundations of our jurisprudence.
― Vandana Shiva
If you see cattle as a source of organic manure, animal energy, as well as milk products, then Indian cattle are not inferior. It is only when you measure them as milk machines that they become inferior. What if we measured the dairy cows of America or Jersey or the Swiss Alps in terms of their work functions? They would be terribly inferior.
― Vandana Shiva
For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.
― Vandana Shiva
Population control is not an issue involving contraceptives for third world women. It is an issue of ecological justice.
― Vandana Shiva
I believe that we will see a lot of destruction, but I believe that if we can see the right patterns and draw the right lessons from that destruction, we might be able to rebuild before it's too late. And then I have that ultimate optimism that even if we can't, life will rebuild itself. In a way, the global economy might collapse, but Gaia won't, and people's ingenuity won't. We will rebuild society, we will rebuild local economies, we will rebuild human aspirations.
― Vandana Shiva
I've just been told that Nestle has taken out patents on the making of pullao. (Pullao is the way we make our rice in India, with either vegetables or meat or whatever.) Before you know it, every common use of plants will be patented by a Western corporation.
― Vandana Shiva
Click Here - To return back to the Full Author Index Listed
Keywords: Vandana Shiva Quotes, Quotations, Sayings, Inspirational, Intuition, Wisdom, Motivational, Life, Journey, Awakening, Spiritual, affirmations, UK, South Africa,
Subscribe to the Free Weekly Intuition E-Newsletter By clicking HERE
