8 Quotes & Sayings By Rose George

Rose George is an award-winning writer, journalist, and activist. She is the author of two bestselling books, Man Walks into a Room: Stories from the Frontiers of Climate Change (2008) and The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (2011). George has written for Harper's Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Longreads, the Guardian, the Telegraph, and many others. She has worked as a journalist in East Africa and South Asia for more than 15 years.

1
What they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They've made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They've sanitized it. Rose George
2
Felixstowe, the United Kingdom's largest port, stops work only for Christmas Day and for crane-toppling Force 9 gales. Rose George
3
Because sanitation has so many effects across all aspects of development - it affects education, it affects health, it affects maternal mortality and infant mortality, it affects labor - it's all these things, so it becomes a political football. Nobody has full responsibility. Rose George
4
Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms? How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination. Rose George
5
The more ships have grown in size and consequence, the more their place in our imagination has shrunk. Rose George
6
The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which controls the living environment on shuttles and on the International Space Station, doesn't have the luxury of disposal: discharging trash into space has long been judged a bad idea. Rose George
7
Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history. It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society? Rose George