David Fleming Quotes

Forward movement is not helpful if what is needed is a change of direction.

It's not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That’s a part of the wheel of life - systems do collapse. So I’m to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation - quite hard for it to live down - that it's going to destroy the entire planet with it.

The claim that industrial agriculture is the only way of feeding a large population is about as scientific as a belief in Creationism - and far more damaging.

As people surrender the power to build the institutions they want, which would enable lives that make sense to them, the system as a whole sacrifices the intelligence it needs: it loses its minds.

While democracy has advanced, the part we ordinary citizens have played in the making and sustaining of the places and communities we live in has diminished. Never has so much been decided for so many by so few.

Coexistence is not toleration; it is resonance; it is the nature of the human ecology.

Holism [is] the art — in contrast with reductionism — of seeing a complex system as a whole. Holism knows the limits to its understanding; it acknowledges that the system has its wildness, its privacy, its own reasons, its defences against invasive explanation ... It does not pretend to understand the whole school just on the evidence of dissecting the geography teacher.

Do nothing that matters without consulting a conversation.

'The harder I work, the luckier I get'. It was Thomas Jefferson who started the stream of variations on that theme. He should have added, 'The harder I work on one thing, the unluckier I get on all the other commitments I haven’t had time for'.

Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.

Reliance on the market economy has led to the asset of a common culture falling into neglect; sometimes we pick through the ruins like tourists marvelling at a lost settlement and guessing at what was once there. It would be helpful—though late in the day—to stop dismantling what remains of a culture in today’s political economy, and to start to re-grow cultural and artistic links as an essential basis for cohesion in a future which, from where we sit, will be barely recognisable.

The difficult task will not be to move away from our market-based civil society: that will fall away so fast that we will find it hard to believe it was ever there. The task, on the contrary, is to recognise that the seeds of a community ethic—and, indeed, of benevolence—still exist. It is to join up the remnants of local culture that survive, and give it the chance to get its confidence back. We now need to move from a precious interest in culture as entertainment, often passive and solitary, to culture in its original, earthy senses of the story and celebration, the guardianship and dance that tell you where you are, and who is there with you...

At present, we have a policy-response shaped by sophisticated climate science, brilliant technology and pop behaviourism, based on simple assumptions about carrot-and-stick incentives.

Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.

Life-saving information tends to come in local dialects.