Success Quote by Maurice Strong

Sustainable development, in Maurice Strong's telling, has already won the most important battle: it has entered the mainstream vocabulary, even among the skeptics. The line is strategically calibrated optimism from a businessman who understood that ideas don’t become real because they’re morally right; they become real when they’re impossible to ignore. By stressing that the concept is "known" even by those who "haven't accepted it", Strong sketches a familiar corporate reality: adoption often trails awareness, and awareness is the pressure point where reputations, regulators, investors, and supply chains start to tighten.

The subtext is a quiet repositioning of power. Strong isn’t pleading for belief; he’s describing a market shift. "Recognized, debated and followed" reads like a lifecycle of institutional normalization: first you acknowledge the term, then you fight over its meaning, then you operationalize it. That sequence flatters business as the arena where ideals are stress-tested and translated into practice, but it also implies that resistance is becoming a minority posture - not heroic dissent, just lagging compliance.

Context matters: Strong was a key architect of modern global environmental governance, and he watched sustainability migrate from UN conference rooms into boardrooms. The phrase "increasing number of businesses" is doing double duty: it’s a progress report and a subtle nudge. If your competitors are "following" it, you’re not deciding whether sustainability matters; you’re deciding whether you’ll be late. That’s the intent: to make sustainability feel less like a crusade and more like the new baseline for legitimacy.