Quotes on environment
Take care of the earth and she will take care of you.
Unknown, Author
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 They have been replaced by risks of humanity's own making - the unintended side-effects of beneficial technologies and the intended effects of the technologies of war.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.
Davies, J. Clarence
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.
Stern, Gil
For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death.
McMillan, Tom
In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment.
Wilkinson, Richard
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Einstein, Albert
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.
Seaborg, Glenn T.
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.
Haas, Charles
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.
Krutch, Joseph Wood
Newspapers: dead trees with information smeared on them.
Horizon
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
Thoreau, Henry David
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.
Sagan, Carl
Water flows uphill towards money.
Anonymous
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!
Dillman, Don A.
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.
de Bergerac, Savinien de Cyrano
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.
Gore, Al
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
I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers.
Delecto, Ymber
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.
Kingsolver, Barbara
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.
Buffet, Jimmy
Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
Bach, Richard
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Vaughan, Bill
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.
Brin, David
Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.
Dubos, René
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.
Arp, Jean
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.
Brown, Pat
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.
Abbey, Edward
Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth.
McHarg, Ian
Man maketh a death which Nature never made.
Young, Edward
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.
Mumford, Lewis
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.
Lynd, Robert S.
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.
Voto, Bernand De
In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air.
Unknown, Author
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
Adams, Ansel
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.
Bush, George W.
There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.
Eagle, Brooke Medicine
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
Tikkanen, Henrik
Earth Day is an occasion to reflect on what we can do to make our fragile world a cleaner, healthier, safer place to live.
Dodd, Christopher
For three decades, Democrats and Republicans worked together to make our environment better.
Dodd, Christopher
We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.
Dodd, Christopher
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.
Dodd, Christopher