Latest Quotes

“My message to the young people of the world is that right now we are facing an existential crisis, I mean, the climate and ecological crisis, and it will have a massive impact on our lives in the future, but also now, especially in vulnerable communities. And I think that we should wake up, and we s…”

— Greta Thunberg, “We Are Striking to Disrupt the System”

“Many climate and environmental activists are being attacked, and they are being, in some cases, even killed. And so I’m not the one who we should be focusing on in these cases. And it’s just horrible that you are trying to stand up for something that should be taken for granted—a living world and a…”

— Greta Thunberg, “We Are Striking to Disrupt the System”

“I think this movement has made a difference; otherwise, they wouldn’t be spending their time trying to discredit us and to mock us.”

— Greta Thunberg, “We Are Striking to Disrupt the System”

“We can no longer save the world by playing by the rules.”

— Greta Thunberg, “We Are Striking to Disrupt the System”

“Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. So we can no longer save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed. So we have not come here to beg the world leaders to ca…”

— Greta Thunberg, “We Are Striking to Disrupt the System”

“I shouldn’t be sitting here doing nothing, wasting my time, when I can actually have an impact. And then I sort of started to become better, and then I became a climate activist. And that helped a lot. And I think the more involved I became, the more involved I got in the climate movement, the bette…”

— Greta Thunberg, “We Are Striking to Disrupt the System”

“It is very moving to see everyone who is so passionate to march and strike. People of all ages, all generations. It is a very good day, I would say.”

— Greta Thunberg, 'She seems very happy'

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Enti…”

— Greta Thunberg, Across the globe, millions join biggest climate protest ever

“I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.”

— Greta Thunberg, The Guardian view on teenage activists

“Yesterday I spent the day with the D-day veteran Charles Norman Shay at Omaha beach. It was a day I will never forget. Not only because of the unimaginable bravery and sacrifices made by those who gave their lives to defend the freedom and democracy of the world. But also because they managed to do…”

— Greta Thunberg, Greta Thunberg Joins Arnold Schwarzenegger & More To Deliver Speeches On Climate | TIME

“We have not treated this crisis as a crisis; we see it as another problem that needs to be fixed. But it is so much more than that. It’s an existential crisis, more important than anything else.”

— Greta Thunberg, Across the globe, millions join biggest climate protest ever

“We live in a strange world where children must sacrifice their own education in order to protest against the destruction of their future. Where the people who have contributed the least to this crisis are the ones who are going to be affected the most.”

— Greta Thunberg, Swedish teen leads Belgian students on 7th climate march

“According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our .CO2 emissions by at least 50%.”

— Greta Thunberg, 'It's an existential crisis. Listen to scientists'

“I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire—because it is.”

— Greta Thunberg, The Guardian view on teenage activists

“I want to feel safe. How can I feel safe when I know we are in the greatest crisis in human history?”

— Greta Thunberg, The Guardian view on teenage activists

“The journalistic writer is a person who fights with their pen against something or someone.”

— Czeslaw Milosz, A Semi-Private Letter About Poetry

“Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is terror-inducing, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth.”

— Martin Heidegger, Fred-Break-Aesthetics-Black-Radical-Tradition.pdf

“Perhaps my life was triumphant not because it lacked evil and defeats but because I could see with my own eyes how what was just a vague promise is slowing being fulfilled and how that which I suspected of false greatness is disintegrating. The concealed structure of reality is reasonable.”

— Czeslaw Milosz, To Begin Where I Am

“I permitted myself everything except complaints.”

— Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney celebrates the life of Czeslaw Milosz

“Censorship may be tolerant of various avant-garde antics, since they keep writers busy and make literature an innocent pastime for a very restricted elite. But as soon as a writer shows signs of being attentive to reality, censorship clamps down.”

— Czeslaw Milosz, Notes on Exile