Our House Is on Fire Quotes

“When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“We experience more, we feel more, we have more and stronger opinions. On social media we debate social issues at a speed and to an extent that makes the 1990s seem like the Middle Ages. Nothing gets to just be, everything has to be taken to extremes. Everything has to be brought to a head. We produce more. We consume more. In fact, whatever it is we do, we do it more. Much more.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“I read about all the burned-out people on a burned-out planet where weather, wind and everyday struggles intensify with every second of the day. And i think that these are all symptoms of exactly the same disease: a planetary crisis that arose because we have turned out backs on each other. We have turned our backs on nature. We have turned our backs on ourselves.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Because if we knew - if we really understood the consequences of what we're doing and kept on doing it...what would that say about us?”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Humanity’s greatest leaders, the ones who will be remembered, have all had one thing in common – at the right moment they have chosen to put our future ahead of the present.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“There are those,’ Kevin continues, ‘who think that we scientists shouldn’t tell it like it is because it’s too political. I think it’s the other way around. It’s those who choose to be silent who are truly political, because their silence says that everything is okay, and that’s an extremely powerful message that supports the status quo, or business-as-usual.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Differentness is the basis of all art. And without art everything is going to slowly, slowly crumble into nothing.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Politicians – needless to say – are there to win elections. And you don’t win elections by telling it as it is – you win elections by telling people what they want to hear.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“It’s not everyone who has messed it up. There are a few, and to be able to save the planet we have to take up the fight against them and their companies and their money and hold them accountable.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Someone has to talk openly about a school system where one in four pupils ends up excluded. Pupils who end up without a diploma because special-education private schools that make millions in profit ‘failed’ to hire any teachers. The world’s most profitable failure.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Autism and ADHD and all the other neuropsychiatric functional impairments are not handicaps per se. In many cases, they can be a superpower, that out-of-the-box thinking you so often hear performers, artists and celebrities talk about. Performers like me, for instance. But the complications that can arise because of a diagnosis can definitely be compared to a handicap; a handicap that is created by ignorance, incorrect treatment, discrimination or an inability to provide much-needed societal adaptation.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Greta has a diagnosis, but it doesn’t rule out the fact that she’s right and the rest of us have got it all wrong.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Anno Domini 2017 In the year 2017, 9 million people died from environmental pollution. Over 20,000 researchers and scientists issued a sharp warning to humanity and explained that we’re heading for a climate and sustainability catastrophe; time is running out. In the year 2017, German researchers determined that 75–80 per cent of insects had disappeared. Not much later came the report that the bird population in France has ‘collapsed’, and that certain bird species have been reduced by up to 70 per cent because they have no insects to eat. In the year 2017, forty-two individuals had more money than half the world’s population combined and 82 per cent of the world’s total increase in wealth went to the richest 1 per cent. Sea ice and glaciers were melting at a record rate. 65 million people were displaced. Hurricanes and torrential rain claimed thousands of victims, drowned cities and smashed whole nations to bits. It was also the year when the emissions curve again turned upwards, at the same time as the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere increased at a velocity which, from a larger geologic perspective, can only be compared to pressing the warp button in a Star Trek movie.”
― Malena Ernman, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

“Polvere sei e in polvere ritornerai, diciamo.
Tutto ciò che una volta ha avuto vita riposerà nella terra, diciamo.
Poi qualcuno ha scoperto un sacco di petrolio e il riposo della terra è finito. Abbiamo creato una società costruita sull'idea di dissotterrare i resti fossili della vita per poi, appena possibile, bruciarli nell'atmosfera altamente sensibile del pianeta.”
― Malena Ernman, Scener ur hjärtat