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Maurice Strong Quotes

Maurice Frederick Strong, was a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and a diplomat who served as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.Strong had his start as an entrepreneur in the Alberta oil patch and was President of Power Corporation of Canada until 1966. In the early 1970s he was Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and then became the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He returned to Canada to become Chief Executive Officer of Petro-Canada from 1976 to 1978. He headed Ontario Hydro, one of North America's largest power utilities, was national president and chairman of the Extension Committee of the World Alliance of YMCAs, and headed American Water Development Incorporated. He served as a commissioner of the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1986 and was recognised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a leader in the international environmental movement.He was President of the Council of the University for Peace from 1998 to 2006. More recently Strong was an active honorary professor at Peking University and honorary chairman of its Environmental Foundation. He was chairman of the advisory board for the Institute for Research on Security and Sustainability for Northeast Asia. He died at the age of 86 in 2015. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. April 1929 – 27. November 2015
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Maurice Strong: 5   quotes 2   likes

Famous Maurice Strong Quotes

“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group's conclusion is 'no'. The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Maurice Strong

Maurice Strong, Interview 1992, concerning the plot of a book he would like to write

“It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”

Maurice Strong

Maurice Strong, 1992 essay entitled Stockholm to Rio: A Journey Down a Generation
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=gvIvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA535

“Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions.”

Maurice Strong

Source: "Facing Down Armageddon: Environment at a Crossroads," essay by Maurice Strong in World Policy Journal, Summer, 2009 "Successful management of today's traumatic processes of change will not be easy to achieve. Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions, particularly in terms of safeguarding the global environment that this transition will require and whose results are often not immediately apparent."

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.”

Maurice Strong

Maurice Strong, opening speech at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit But this quotation is not in the version posted on Mr. Strong's site. http://www.mauricestrong.net/index.php/opening-statement6

“If we don't change, our species will not survive… Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.”

Maurice Strong

Maurice Strong, September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine

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