Rachel Carson Quotes - Page 5

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the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But the solution seems always to bring with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last, final mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I cherish a very unscientific hope that they will not be.

Rachel Carson

Ocean, Sea, Yesterday

Rachel Carson (2011). “Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson”, p.80, Beacon Press

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There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change There was a strange stillness The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

Rachel Carson

Morning, Spring, Heart

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Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.

Rachel Carson

Change, Nature, Men

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.5, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

Rachel Carson

Science, Fiction, Literature

"Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson" edited by Linda Lear, (p. 91), 1999.

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When any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end as natural. When that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.

Rachel Carson

Death, Running, Unhappy

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Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent... It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to speak out to many thousands of people.

Rachel Carson

Speaks Out, Knowing, People

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Why would anyone believe it is possible to lay down such barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.

Rachel Carson

Believe, Environmental, Poison

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes-nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the 'good' and the 'bad,' to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil-all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called 'insecticides,' but 'biocides.'

Rachel Carson

Weed, Song, Believe

Paul Brooks, Rachel Carson (1972). “The house of life: Rachel Carson at work”

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For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future... Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time.

Rachel Carson

Men, Past, Links

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.208, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living.

Rachel Carson

Nature, Contentment, Earth

Rachel Carson (2011). “The Sense of Wonder”, p.41, Open Road Media

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Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect ... without also killing the 'good' insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter and maintaining healthy soil?

Rachel Carson

Healthy, Matter, Soil

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power.

Rachel Carson

Wings, Bird, Decision

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.127, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.

Rachel Carson

Philosophy, Giving, Silent Spring

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, . . . when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man . . . . It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.

Rachel Carson

Men, Arrogance, Phrases

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.297, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.

Rachel Carson

Eras, Problem, Fit

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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And so in my mind's eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality - earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.

Rachel Carson

Eye, Reality, Sea

Paul Brooks, Rachel Carson (1972). “The house of life: Rachel Carson at work”

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As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.

Rachel Carson

Humility, Men, Delicate Life

Silent Spring ch. 17 (1962)

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We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?

Rachel Carson

Radiation, Environment, Chemicals

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.37, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.

Rachel Carson

War, Animal, Men

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.8, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow.

Rachel Carson

Men, Thinking, Years

"Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson", edited by Linda Lear, (p. 96), 1999.

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Darling -- I suppose the world would consider us absolutely crazy, but it is wonderful to feel that way, isn't it? Sort of a perpetual springtime in our hearts.

Rachel Carson

Crazy, Heart, World

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Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment-a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.

Rachel Carson

Our World, Yesterday, Drug

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.207, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.

Rachel Carson

Ocean, Past, Rivers

Rachel Carson (2011). “The Sea Around Us”, p.160, Open Road Media

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Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life.

Rachel Carson

Men, Focus, Shapes

Preface to "Humane Biology Projects" by the Animal Welfare Institute, 1961.

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To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view.

Rachel Carson

Garden, Views, Years

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Born: May 27, 1907
Died: April 14, 1964
Occupation: Marine biologist
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