Americans have a severe disease - worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.
Mikhail GorbachevRead
We need a new environmental consciousness on a global basis. To do this, we need to educate people.
Interpretation
A global awareness and education about the environment is essential for change.
Mikhail Gorbachev emphasizes the need for a renewed and collective environmental awareness around the world. He argues that educating people is crucial for fostering this consciousness, as it is only through understanding and knowledge that effective action can be taken to protect our planet.
In practice
In a speech about corporate responsibility, one might invoke this quote to highlight the importance of environmental education.
Americans have a severe disease - worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.
Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep.
The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.
To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
New approaches are needed, new orientations in both thought and action. We must make the transition to a new civilization...We are talking of a transition toward a new civilization. No one knows what it will be like. What is important is to orient in that direction... I am convinced that a new civilization will inevitably take on certain features that are characteristic of, or inherent in, the socialist ideal.
According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible.... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.
The women of the Green Belt Movement have learned about the causes and the symptoms of environmental degradation. They have begun to appreciate that they, rather than their government, ought to be the custodians of the environment.
I think history shows that countries have to have some kind of a threshold level of economic success before they begin to have the means and the will to focus on the environment.
You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can't print life to bail out a planet.
Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.
What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.
The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.
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