Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love documentary because it's alive.
Culture is the air we breathe all around us.
Journalism is irrepressible. It can't be taken away.
Natural gas is a dirty fossil fuel like the rest of them.
When you're cornered, there are two things you can do: move or fight.
We are letting the extractive energy industries turn the world inside out.
Watching a film should feel like you just tore a hole out of the air and the void caught fire.
When your science runs into a policy roadblock, all of a sudden the science starts to disappear.
We should be moving vigorously towards renewable energy. The technology of which is right here right now.
I'm a night owl, and luckily my profession supports that. The best ideas come to me in the dead of night.
People treat citizens like they're some kind of unreliable source, but citizens are data. They are a data set.
When you can light your water on fire due to methane contamination in your ground water, what else can you do but laugh?
When you work with people for a long time, you start to sense what they are thinking without having to communicate explicitly.
I really hate to be Debbie Downer right now, because everyone would love to say, "Yeah, we're finally doing something on climate!
We all know that we have to get off of fossil fuels. And we know that the world is going in that direction. And we have to do it fast.
Thousands upon thousands of people across America and many more across the globe are suffering at the hands of the oil and gas industry.
Water is a cure-all. Water is everything. You can't get better without drinking lots of water, and you can't drink water unless it's clean.
You know, there's a difference between politicians and leaders. Politicians read poll numbers and compromise. Leaders do what's morally right.
I think we're in an era of unprecedented dominance by corporations. I think people understand that deeply; I don't think that's even questioned.
I don't believe we're only motivated by our own self-interests. Often out of crisis comes this enormous wellspring of generosity and motivation.
I think 'Gasland' is the doorway for a lot of people to see something happening in their backyard and realize the national and global implications.
According to the oil and gas industry and their proponents, I am a communist, terrorist, Nazi, Russian-sympathizing, anti-American, arsonist, extremist.
History is often best told from the ground, out of a car window or in someone's kitchen, not through some huge production mechanism or grand framing device.
When you live in a watershed area, in a pristine area, and you could watch this whole place fall apart in front of your eyes, you don't sell your soul for a buck.
The BP spill was the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history. Yet somehow, gas companies like BP and Halliburton ran interference on reporting that story.
I think that the world is in the middle of a huge transition that we have to make to renewable energy. We have to transition away from fossil fuels very, very quickly.
When you have corporate influence on our government outweighing the influence of citizens, that's terrifying. This is something we have to make a big, big noise about.
The history of fossil-fuel development has always been that certain people are expendable. What's changed is that new, larger populations are now considered expendable.
We're not living in a society that science actually dominates the conversation. We're living in a situation where some science is allowed and a lot of it's about policy.
When the natural gas industry was knocking on my door, they were knocking on the door of millions of people. And that became something that Americans really needed to focus on.
I've been arrested three times. I don't like getting arrested, but it's not so bad when it's an organized form of nonviolent disobedience. It's something appealing to a higher law.
What we've got is the wholesale embrace of fracking domestically, internationally and for export. And this couldn't be further from what we really need to do to address climate change.
The problem is that everywhere the gas drilling industry goes, a trail of water contamination, air pollution, health concerns and betrayal of basic American civic and community values follows.
Natural gas is a bridge fuel. But it's not a bridge - it's a gangplank. It's either a bridge in space or a bridge in time. The bridge in time we don't need. We have renewable technology right now.
I think the audience know which films are aimed at their pocket, and which films are aimed at their soul. There are a lot of films out there made by people who are genuinely trying to make a change.
There are regulations all over the spectrum that have to be done to the existing situation right now. But the only policy that makes sense is a nationwide moratorium: no new fracking, no new fracked wells.
Every single dollar spent lobbying a legislator on behalf of oil and gas is a toxic dollar that undermines public health and safety laws that protect Americans. That's contamination of the political system.
There's something really happening and really moving, and it's exciting and it makes me very optimistic because it is going to be the engine for how we really combat climate change. Which is strong communities.
I love cooking. My Italian mother is a genius cook, and I picked that up from her. I make my own sauce, which takes four hours, from a recipe that's been refined over many years. I won't tell anybody what it is.
I'm a theater guy and a filmmaker. So when my community was thrown up in the air by the gas industry, the way I could contribute was to do something in the film world. I never thought it would be a big deal at all.
I have to have faith that we're going to succeed in transforming where we get our energy from. The big worry is whether or not we're going to do it before it's too late. And I think nobody knows the answer to that.
I love driving. I still drive a 1993 Toyota Camry. I do want to get an electric car, but it's less of a carbon footprint if you keep your old, fuel-efficient car on the road than if you say 'build me a whole new car.'
They're a lot of great scientists and their mission is to protect people. It's the Environmental Protection Agency, but it's really a people protection agency. And they're out there trying to do their job and do the science.
I think what we all have to do is make this big leap towards renewables. And it has to be a solution where you're actually building the answer; and it has to be built faster than the natural gas industry can build their answer.
When you frack a well, you're exploding methane up into the atmosphere. So, Barack Obama, by supporting natural gas, and also talking about climate change is literally burning his own inaugural address. And he's doing it with natural gas.
As a journalist, you have to have multiple sources and verifiable science, and when you've done that and satisfied the most skeptical voice in your head, you have an obligation to ride through the streets - let people know what's going on.
In a couple of decades you have half of the wells that are drilled right now, and you're talking about numbers in the millions of wells drilled, leaking. That's a huge crisis in terms of water contamination. There's no way to fix that problem.
It is an incredibly hopeful experience watching communities come together and actually reassemble democracy. The democracy's been taken away from us. But they're reinventing democracy out there in rural Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, in Pittsburgh.
We have to start processing what we're really made of in America. American character is not dead. American integrity and honesty are not dead. When we're backed up against the wall against the largest corporations in the history of corporations, it's there.
'Memorial Day' is about 'spring break' girls-gone-wild culture which is the seedy underbelly of our American Puritanism, the inverse side of the coin. It's also about how we forcefully exported that culture and then pretended to not know what we were doing.