William McDonough Quotations

We achieved our mission to the moon. Let's look home from that lofty perch and reimagine our mission on Earth - that is what we need to do here. Together, we can upcycle everything. The world will be better for our positive visions and actions.

Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.

I am very focused on large-scale deployments of renewable power and how we're going to get this done. Imagine our military bases covered with solar thermal collectors that could generate steam and electricity.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

We get jealous not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us.

I think the job of an original designer is to inspire.

Art is about going a little nuts... Kids do art for fun. It's playing.

We are all born artists... Almost everything kids do is art.

I see that idea that we need a new form as something critical. I mean, we do need to invent and not be benchmarking all the time. That's important to me.

I suggest we take our heads out of the tar sands and look up to see the sun. We don't own it, but it provides us all with great, endless value. So, too, the wind. These free, renewable sources of 'energy currency' are perfect partners to what we own together.

If you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure. People will question your actions.

There are data saying that the economy is starting to recover, and there are data saying that it tends to be weak,

There is no question that the U.S. economy, especially in relation to the world economy, is beginning to exhibit signs of imbalance and strain.

I can think of no more important project than this one because its ambitions are so high.

we (the Fed) will do what we have to do to maintain price stability.

It is often said that in our next meeting, we cannot do anything because there are elections,

When we think the economic recovery is much more clear and certain than it is now, we will have time to do what is necessary,

At this point I don't want to discuss any future other than saving the shipyard,

terribly bad social policy and perhaps even bad morals.

This dovetails nicely with what we're doing. Our role is to help Wal-Mart workers get a voice on the job.

It was an easy dunk for the commission to decide that the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Navy (Gordon English) were just way off base,

If you depart from those expectations -- that is, if you break the rules, if you ignore the spirit of the law even while meeting the letter -- woe be unto you. There will be consequences, and they will be grave.

I dont think theres any likelihood in the world that he will reject the list,

All have met stringent environmental and human health standards in product design achievement.

It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works.

I'd rather have that dialogue right now than only the other one, which is starting at such a basic level, that we start rearranging stuff on the Titanic, trying to be less bad with ordinary stuff.

I'd so much rather have exciting architecture that causes one to stop, breathe, and reflect on the potential of the human mind, the craft, and exploring things.

It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.

I just think it is so delightful to see people, let their elbows free. I think the exuberance of it all is really exciting to me. It's a signal of the abundance of diversity and creative expression.

We have carbon in the atmosphere. That is a material in the wrong place problem. It's just like what I said about the lead. Lead in the biosphere is not good. Carbon in the atmosphere (over natural levels) is a problem.

If you don't like carbon, if you want to be zero carbon, then you might as well shoot yourself, dry up and blow away because you are carbon.

Design is the first signal of human intention.

Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.

Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture,'

Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager's job to "do things right." It is an executive's job to make sure "the right things" get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more "efficient."

The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.

If you don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.

In planetary terms, we're all downstream.

I can't imagine something being beautiful at this point in history if it's destroying the planet or causing children to get sick. How can anything be beautiful if it's not ecologically intelligent at this point?

All these corporate reports say they want zero carbon. Well that is ridiculous, because you are not telling us what you are, you are telling us what you are not.

We are proposing buildings that, like trees, are net energy exporters, produce more energy than they consume, accrue and store solar energy, and purify their own waste, water and release it slowly in a purer form.

Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.

The eco-effective future of industry is a world of abundance that celebrates the use and consumption of products and materials that are, in effect, nutritious - as safe, effective, and delightful as a cherry tree.

Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar.

Honor commerce as the engine of change.

I think as designers we realize design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence.

How do we love all the children of all species for all time?

I am working right at both the levels- with the most wealthy clients in the world, but also the poorest. I spend half my time designing for people that have nothing.

Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place

If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.

Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.

Modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, I didn't intend to cause global warning, it's not part of my plan, then we realize it's part of our defacto plan because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan.

So when you see a regulation against lead, because lead is a bad in a regulators mind, what does that mean? You are not telling us what is good, you are just tell us what you don't want, not what you do want.

Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.

The problem carbon is that everyone thinks we have an energy problem, we don't. We have plenty of energy. We have a carbon problem. Carbon is a material, so we have a material problem, not an energy problem.

You need that same creative force that exists in a building like Disney [Walt Disney Concert Hall] to actually tackle that most prosaic of problems.

You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.

We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?

We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem

We are not a green standard, we are a quality standard. We're different, we're multi dimensional.

In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'

The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.

Don't get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It's just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there's an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it's wireless!

We realized we don't have an invention, that's why we gave it away.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.

Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.

We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.

If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.

Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.

And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?