Born on April 1st 1940, Maathai Wangari was the founder of the Green Belt Movement and a 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Maathai Wangari was born in Nyeri, South Central Kenya; she was the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree.
Here are the Top 20 Quotes of Maathai Wangari
Top 20 Quotes of Maathai Wangari
1. Human rights are not things that are put on the table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for and then you protect.
2. You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself. That values itself. That understands itself.”
3. I’m very conscious of the fact that you can’t do it alone. It’s teamwork. When you do it alone you run the risk that when you are no longer there nobody else will do it.
4. We refuse to share resources; we govern irresponsibly. If we are confident, if we have some of our cultural values, then we would be more committed to assisting our people out of poverty and creating an environment that can make it possible for our friends to assist us.
5. The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.
6. Education, if it means anything, should not take people away from the land, but instill in them even more respect for it, because educated people are in a position to understand what is being lost. The future of the planet concerns all of us, and all of us should do what we can to protect it. As I told the foresters, and the women, you don’t need a diploma to plant a tree.
7. There are opportunities even in the most difficult moments.
8. You can make a lot of speeches, but the real thing is when you dig a hole, plant a tree, give it water, and make it survive. That’s what makes the difference
9. There comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness . . . that time is now.
10. For us who are now in power, we need to be challenged to serve the people and ignore our own egos and personal interests so that we can really demonstrate to other African states that it is possible to share power without going to war
11. What people see as fearlessness is really persistence.
12. You have to know yourself, and that once you know yourself, then you cannot be bound by – because sometimes we are bound by other people’s thoughts, because we are not sure about ourselves. But once you know yourself… I guess it is really an expression of the biblical statements that the truth will make you free! When you know, then you are free, your mind is free.
13. We all share one planet and are one humanity; there is no escaping this reality.
14. No matter how dark the cloud, there is always a thin, silver lining, and that is what we must look for. The silver lining will come, if not to us then to next generation or the generation after that. And maybe with that generation the lining will no longer be thin.
15.When people can’t use you, they ridicule what you represent. I was lucky that I understood that, because when one does not understand that, it is very easy to be broken and to be subdued.
16. We all share one planet and are one humanity; there is no escaping this reality.
17. African women in general need to know that it’s OK for them to be the way they are – to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence.
18. We tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty. But you can’t reduce poverty in a vacuum. You are doing it in an environment.
19. When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and seeds of hope. We also secure the future for our children.
20. No matter who or where we are, or what our capabilities, we are called to do the best we can.