In talking about my cancer with family and friends, I feel the love that I know will get me through this. The old strategy of suffering in silence could not have been more misguided.
Interpretation
Acknowledging and sharing struggles can bring love and support during difficult times.
In this quote, George Monbiot emphasizes the importance of open communication about personal struggles, such as illness, with loved ones. He reflects on how sharing his experience with cancer has allowed him to feel the love and support from family and friends, contrasting this with the outdated notion of silently enduring hardships, which may lead to isolation rather than healing.
In practice
A motivational speech at a cancer awareness event.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.
Choose to chance the rapids and dare to dance the tide.
In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.
The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.
I never question God. Sometimes I say, 'Why me? Why do I have such a hard life? Why do I have this disease? Why do I have siblings who died?' But then I think and say, 'Why not me?'
Fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.
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