Quotes on environment
Take care of the earth and she will take care of you.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
Today's world is one in which the age-old risks of humankind - the drought, floods, communicable diseases - are less of a problem than ever before. They have been replaced by risks of humanity's own making - the unintended side-effects of beneficial technologies and the intended effects of the technologies of war. Society must hope that the world's ability to assess and manage risks will keep pace with its ability to create them.
Link to Quote
J. Clarence Davies Quotes
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.
Link to Quote
Gil Stern Quotes
For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death.
Link to Quote
Tom McMillan Quotes
We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.
Link to Quote
Francis Bacon Quotes
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."
Link to Quote
Art Buchwald Quotes
In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment.
Link to Quote
Richard Wilkinson Quotes
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Link to Quote
Albert Einstein Quotes
One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.
Link to Quote
Glenn T. Seaborg Quotes
They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.
Link to Quote
James G. Watt Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Albert Einstein Quotes
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Link to Quote
Richard P. Feynman Quotes
Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away.
Link to Quote
Stephanie Mills Quotes
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
Link to Quote
Edward O. Wilson Quotes
Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.
Link to Quote
Dave Foreman Quotes
The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing.
Link to Quote
Loudon Wainwright Quotes
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Link to Quote
Aldo Leopold Quotes
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years.
Link to Quote
Charles Haas Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Mahatma Gandhi Quotes
Living in the midst of abundance we have the greatest difficulty in seeing that the supply of natural wealth is limited and that the constant increase of population is destined to reduce the American standard of living unless we deal more sanely with our resources.
Link to Quote
W.H. Carothers Quotes
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
Link to Quote
Havelock Ellis Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes
Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, was a major factor in the development of the Western worldview. A basic Christian belief was that God gave humans dominion over creation, with the freedom to use the environment as they saw fit. Another important Judeo-Christian belief predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in the future. One interpretation of this belief is that the Earth is only a temporary way station on the soul's journey to the afterlife. Because these beliefs tended to devalue the natural world, they fostered attitudes and behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment.
Link to Quote
Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz Quotes
Newspapers: dead trees with information smeared on them.
Link to Quote
Horizon Quotes
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
Link to Quote
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.
Link to Quote
Michel de Montaigne Quotes
The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it.
Link to Quote
Chinese Proverb Quotes
Who discovered that CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons] posed a threat to the ozone layer? Was it the principal manufacturer, the DuPont Corporation, exercising corporate responsibility? Was it the Environmental Protection Agency protecting us? Was it the Department of Defense defending us? No, it was two ivory-tower, white-coated university scientists working on something else - Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California, Irvine. Not even an Ivy League university. No one instructed them to look for dangers to the environment. They were pursuing fundamental research. They were scientists following their own interests. Their names should be known to every schoolchild.
Link to Quote
Carl Sagan Quotes
Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat - glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?
Link to Quote
Frank N. Ikard Quotes
Water flows uphill towards money.
Link to Quote
Anonymous Quotes
Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher [quality of life] not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have!
Link to Quote
Don A. Dillman Quotes
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.
Link to Quote
Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac Quotes
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.
Link to Quote
Chief Luther Standing Bear Quotes
As president, I will bring all the parties and stakeholders together. I am going to come up with a solution that respects the environment and does not cause an upheaval in the economy.
Link to Quote
Al Gore Quotes
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
Link to Quote
E.F. Schumacher Quotes
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
Link to Quote
Sir George Porter Quotes
When you use a manual push mower, you're "cutting" down on pollution and the only thing in danger of running out of gas is you!
Link to Quote
Grey Livingston Quotes
We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men as anything but a void. The "waste howling wilderness" of Deuteronomy is typical. The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated land which is occupied "only" by wild animals. Places not used by us are "wastes." Areas not occupied by us are "desolate." Could the desolation be in the soul of man?
Link to Quote
John A. Livingston Quotes
The human race will be the cancer of the planet.
Link to Quote
Julian Huxley Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Lynn White Quotes
I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe.
Link to Quote
William O. Douglas Quotes
Every day is Earth Day.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers.
Link to Quote
Ymber Delecto Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Herman E. Daly Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Jimmy Buffet Quotes
Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
Link to Quote
Richard Bach Quotes
We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.
Link to Quote
Jeremy Rifkin Quotes
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
Link to Quote
Carl Sagan Quotes
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Link to Quote
Bill Vaughan Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
David Brin Quotes
Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.
Link to Quote
René Dubos Quotes
When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up... When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don't chop down the trees.
Link to Quote
Wintu Indian Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Jean Arp Quotes
When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.
Link to Quote
Pat Brown Quotes
Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!
Link to Quote
Dr. Paul MacCready Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Edward Abbey Quotes
Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth.
Link to Quote
Ian McHarg Quotes
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.
Link to Quote
Paul Brooks Quotes
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.
Link to Quote
Albert Schweitzer Quotes
The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children.
Link to Quote
Paul R. Ehrlich Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Garrett Hardin Quotes
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Link to Quote
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
Man maketh a death which Nature never made.
Link to Quote
Edward Young Quotes
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.
Link to Quote
Ross Perot Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Lewis Mumford Quotes
The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence. It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history to pet itself.
Link to Quote
Henry Fairlie Quotes
There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.
Link to Quote
Mohandas K. Gandhi Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Robert S. Lynd Quotes
It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood.
Link to Quote
Bernand De Voto Quotes
In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
Link to Quote
Ansel Adams Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
George W. Bush Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
Anton Chekhov Quotes
I'm not an environmentalist. I'm an Earth warrior.
Link to Quote
Darryl Cherney Quotes
There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.
Link to Quote
Brooke Medicine Eagle Quotes
The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself.
Link to Quote
Ernest Jones Quotes
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
Link to Quote
John Muir Quotes
Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake. During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast.
Link to Quote
William Rathje Quotes
I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?
Link to Quote
Robert Redford Quotes
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.
Link to Quote
Wallace Stegner Quotes
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
Link to Quote
Henrik Tikkanen Quotes
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.
Link to Quote
E. B. White Quotes
Earth Day is an occasion to reflect on what we can do to make our fragile world a cleaner, healthier, safer place to live.
Link to Quote
Christopher Dodd Quotes
For three decades, Democrats and Republicans worked together to make our environment better.
Link to Quote
Christopher Dodd Quotes
We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.
Link to Quote
Christopher Dodd Quotes
We owe it to each other, and to our children and grandchildren, to leave our planet in a better state than when we found it.
Link to Quote
Christopher Dodd Quotes