Paul Greenberg Quotes

“Is it really over?" Kurlansky lamented over the dry-docked Massachusetts cod fishermen at the conclusion of his moving, epic book. "Are these the last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant?"These words stayed with me over the years to come. But histories of environmental wrong doing have a strange way of putting traumatic events in the past, sealing off bad human behavior of former times from the unwritten pages of the present and the future.”

“In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution.”

“One of humankind's most enduring misconceptions is that of nature's bounty... the belief that nature is such a powerful force that it is indestructible.”

“Children need fairy tales, but it is just as essential that they have parents who tell them about their own lives, so that they can establish a relationship to the past.”

“Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer”

“A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory.”

“Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked.”

“Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history." Georges Pompidou”

“It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jetliner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot's seat. – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968”

“There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth.”