Environment Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
René Dubos,
Henry David Thoreau
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| Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris. |
| - Edward Abbey |
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| It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. |
| - Ansel Adams |
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| Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. |
| - Jean Arp |
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| We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them. We say we love trees, yet we cut them down. And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are loved. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| A virgin forest is where the hand of man has never set foot. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Every day is Earth Day. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Take care of the earth and she will take care of you. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Water flows uphill towards money. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere. |
| - Richard Bach |
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| We cannot command Nature except by obeying her. |
| - Francis Bacon |
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| If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age. |
| - Jacques Barzun |
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| A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist. If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it's taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power. His fairness. His very existence. But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says - go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job. Or, better yet, lend me a hand. I have no time for idle whining. |
| - David Brin |
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| And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess." |
| - Art Buchwald |
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| To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance. |
| - Buddha |
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| Our children may save us if they are taught to care properly for the planet; but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the caves from where we first emerged. Then we'll have to view the universe above from a cold, dark place. No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones, drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. |
| - Jimmy Buffet |
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| If you violate [Nature's] laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. |
| - Luther Burbank |
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| The days a man spends fishing or spends hunting should not be deducted from the time that he's on earth. In other words, if I fish today, that should be added to the amount of time I get to live. That's the way I look at recreation. That's why I'll be a big conservation, environmental President, because I plan to fish and hunt as much as I possibly can. |
| - George Bush |
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| For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. |
| - Rachel Carson |
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| It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. |
| - Rachel Carson |
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| Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. |
| - Anton Chekhov |
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| It is obvious that many projects justified by cost-benefit analysis do result in the predictable loss of life. This is true for any projects that increase air or ground traffic, radiation exposure, or air pollution, for example. What allows cost-benefit analysts to "justify" such projects? It is essentially the fact that we never know in advance the identities of the specific people who will be killed. The result is that we never have to compensate anyone for his certain loss of life but instead we must compensate everyone for the additional risk to which he is exposed as a result of the project. |
| - Herman E. Daly |
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| Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead. |
| - Herman E. Daly |
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| I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers. |
| - Ymber Delecto |
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| God never made his work for man to mend. |
| - John Dryden |
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| Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. |
| - René Dubos |
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| Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life. |
| - René Dubos |
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| Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place. |
| - René Dubos |
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| The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory. |
| - René Dubos |
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| We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. |
| - Havelock Ellis |
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| When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he has none. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. |
| - Richard P. Feynman |
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| We never know the worth of water till the well is dry. |
| - Thomas Fuller |
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| The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday. |
| - Dennis Gabor |
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| Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature. |
| - Dennis Gabor |
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| God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. |
| - Mahatma Gandhi |
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| There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed. |
| - Mahatma Gandhi |
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| Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations. |
| - David Gerrold |
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| Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. |
| - Stephen Jay Gould |
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| The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness is many times more powerful if it is earned through physical achievement, if it comes at the end of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous good health is necessary. Practically speaking, this means that no one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means. |
| - Garrett Hardin |
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| The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people. |
| - William Ralph Inge |
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| To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. |
| - Barbara Kingsolver |
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| Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity. Waste not the smallest time in imbecile infirmity, for well thou knowest that seconds form eternity. |
| - E. Knight |
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| When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman. |
| - Joseph Wood Krutch |
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| How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? |
| - Charles A. Lindbergh |
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| Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it. |
| - Charles A. Lindbergh |
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| There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. |
| - Robert S. Lynd |
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| The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. |
| - Marya Mannes |
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| There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. |
| - Marshall McLuhan |
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| Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we. |
| - Michel de Montaigne |
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| The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. |
| - John Muir |
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| When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. |
| - John Muir |
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| Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. |
| - Lewis Mumford |
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| The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun. |
| - Ralph Nader |
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| Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth. |
| - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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| Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust? |
| - Lane Olinghouse |
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| There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all. |
| - Robert Orben |
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| The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. |
| - Ross Perot |
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| The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it. |
| - Chinese Proverb |
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| We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. |
| - Native American Proverb |
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| You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. |
| - Native American Proverb |
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| To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. |
| - Theodore Roosevelt |
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| You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one. |
| - Jean Jacques Rousseau |
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| The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. |
| - Carl Sagan |
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| The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology. |
| - E.F. Schumacher |
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| Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. |
| - Albert Schweitzer |
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| Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work. |
| - Caius Plinius Secundus |
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| Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die. |
| - Gil Stern |
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| Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more. |
| - Edwin Way Teale |
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| Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow. |
| - Edwin Way Teale |
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| Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us. |
| - Henrik Tikkanen |
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| We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants, but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves. |
| - Arnold Toynbee |
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| Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. |
| - Bill Vaughan |
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| We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. |
| - Kurt, Jr. Vonnegut |
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| I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority. |
| - Elwyn Brooks White |
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| We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. |
| - Lynn, Jr. White |
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| Man maketh a death which Nature never made. |
| - Edward Young |
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