Success Quote by Maurice Strong

Strong isn’t offering inspiration so much as a warning about psychological surrender masquerading as realism. The line pivots on a blunt behavioral premise: agency isn’t just morally nice, it’s mechanically necessary. “Don’t accept that you can’t” frames defeatism as a choice, not a diagnosis. Then he tightens the vice: if you can’t imagine impact, you won’t take the steps that create impact. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy dressed in plain speech, the kind of logic a businessman uses when he wants to move an audience from abstract concern to operational commitment.

The subtext is about scale and contagion. Strong’s “multiplier” is doing heavy lifting: individual resignation doesn’t stay individual. In climate politics and sustainability debates - Strong helped build much of the modern global environmental architecture - the real enemy is often not denial but diffusion of responsibility. Everyone waits for someone larger, richer, or more powerful to act first. By invoking a multiplier, he’s naming the network effect of inaction: one person’s disengagement becomes many people’s alibi, until the default setting is drift.

“Unsustainable pathway” is technocratic language, but it lands like a verdict. He avoids apocalypse imagery and instead implies balance sheets and trajectory: inputs, outputs, and a system running a deficit. The intent is strategic persuasion: make hope sound less like optimism and more like risk management. In Strong’s worldview, cynicism isn’t sophistication; it’s an accelerant.