Vandana Shiva quotes

Vandana Shiva is an Indian environmental activist, physicist, and author known for her work in sustainable agriculture and social justice. Her advocacy focuses on biodiversity, food sovereignty, and the protection of traditional farming practices. She has inspired movements worldwide for ecological sustainability and the rights of small farmers. Here are 25 of her quotes:

Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.

Vandana Shiva

In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.

Vandana Shiva

If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.

Vandana Shiva

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

Vandana Shiva

When Bill Gates pours money into Africa for feeding the poor in Africa and preventing famine, he's pushing the failed Green Revolution, he's pushing chemicals, pushing GMOs, pushing patterns.

Vandana Shiva

You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.

Vandana Shiva

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

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

Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.

Vandana Shiva

If you look at the graph of the growth of G. M. O. s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it's literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer's.

Vandana Shiva

Nuclear power started in weaponry. It was designed for war. And any instrument that has its origins in war always has the potential for war. First because the material you need to make bombs, you're multiplying it though nuclear power, you're taking uranium and turn it into plutonium. Second by equipping governments and private companies with this potential, in society you spread this potential, that here is a weapon of mass destruction available. This is exactly what happened with fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers came from explosive factories are increasingly used in terrorist attacks.

Vandana Shiva

The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet.

Vandana Shiva

Shiva's words are treated with earnest respect in liberal and environmental circles, where she is held in great esteem. If she insists that Monsanto and its GMO seeds have driven hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers to suicide-and she has said this frequently-then there must be something to it.

Vandana Shiva

When you call somebody a fraud, that suggests the person knows she is lying. I don't think Vandana Shiva necessarily knows that. But she is blinded by her ideology and her political beliefs. That is why she is so effective and so dangerous.

Vandana Shiva

I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.

Vandana Shiva

I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy - not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you.

Vandana Shiva

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 in itself creates new potential.

Vandana Shiva

Gandhi is the other person. I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy - not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

Vandana Shiva

Just like Chief Seattle talked about being in the web of life, in India we talk about vasudhaiva kutumbkam, which means the earth family. Indian cosmology has never separated the human from the non-human-we are a continuum.

Vandana Shiva

The WTO-related events in Seattle created the first experience of a rainbow politics-a successful pluralistic politics, without the working of a master mind, but with the currents and beauty that come out of free thinking. In the new politics, people have different ways of talking, but I feel the core will be living democracy and living economies, and that it will include both taking personal responsibility to make change and being part of national and international movements for change.

Vandana Shiva

Instead of water belonging to millions of local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of the majority.

Vandana Shiva

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy-to bring decisions that directly affect people's lives as close as possible to where people are and to where they can take responsibility.

Vandana Shiva