Enviromental Quotes

• Not only has one to do one's best, one must, while doing one's best, remain detached from whatever one is trying to achieve.

  Janwillem van de Wetering

  Inspirational, Trying, Achieve

  Janwillem van de Wetering (2014). “The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery”, p.142, St. Martin's Griffin

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• The artist...is the voice of the people.

  Alice Walker

  Inspirational, Art, Voice

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• Those who are animated by hope can perform what would seem impossibilities to those who are under the depressing influence of fear.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Inspirational, Depressing, Anticipation

  Maria Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1825). “Works”, p.346

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• If we take a survey of the greatest actions...in the world...we shall find the authors of them all to have been persons whose Brains had been shaken out of their natural position.

  John Adams

  Inspirational, Brain, World

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• None of us can predict when the causes we support will capture the public imagination, and our once-lonely quests become popular crusades.

  Paul Rogat Loeb

  Inspirational, Lonely, Imagination

  Paul Rogat Loeb (2010). “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times”, p.115, Macmillan

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• We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.

  Rollo May

  Inspirational, Commitment, People

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• The prophets preach . . . that pleasure, not will-power and coercion, is how you most deeply transform people.

  Matthew Fox

  Inspirational, People, Coercion

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• Don't wait for anyone to deputize you or authorize you or empower you. You have to just start out with yourself...and put one foot in front of the other.

  Hazel Henderson

  Inspirational, Power, Feet

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• We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.

  Al Gore

  Eugenics, Suffering, Environmental

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• The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.

  Michael Oppenheimer

  Country, Eugenics, Numbers

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• In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways.

  Robert Muller

  Eugenics, Government, Views

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• Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, to halt the destruction of the environment.

  Al Gore

  Mean, Eugenics, Law

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• But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope?-so much is in bud.

  Denise Levertov

  Inspirational, Fullness Of Life, Bud

  Denise Levertov (2003). “Selected Poems”, p.137, New Directions Publishing

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• Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield;
  Learn from the beasts the physic of the field;
  The arts of building from the bee receive;
  Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave.

  Alexander Pope

  Inspirational, Art, Yield

  Alexander Pope (1763). “An essay on man: By Alexander Pope, Esq. Enlarged and improved by the author. Together with his MS. additions and variations as in the last edition of his works. With the notes of William, Lord Bishop of Gloucester”, p.70

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• [Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes . . . deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.

  Lionel Tiger

  Inspirational, Past, Years

  Lionel Tiger (2017). “The Pursuit of Pleasure”, p.33, Routledge

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• I want us all to face our fears and stop behaving like our goal in life is to merely survive. "Surviving" is for wimps and game show contestants stranded in the jungle or on a desert island. You are not stranded. You own the store....You deserve better.

  Michael Moore

  Inspirational, Games, Islands

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• You have much more power when you are working for the right thing than when you are working against the wrong thing. And, of course, if the right thing is established wrong things will fade away of their own accord.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Inspirational, Positivity, Accord

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.124, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.

  Daniel Botkin

  People, Historical, Our Society

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• By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.

  James Lovelock

  Eugenics, Climate, Population

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• Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.

  James Lovelock

  Eugenics, Cells, Earth

  "Healing Gaia: practical medicine for the planet". Book by James Lovelock, 1991.

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• There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.

  E. O. Wilson

  Inspirational, Diversity, Age

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• Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Writing, People

  Robert Frost, David Bradley, Dewitt Jones (1979). “Robert Frost, a tribute to the source”, Henry Holt & Co

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• [The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Inspirational, Lying, Artist

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.189, Harvard University Press

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• Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Inspirational, Writing, Ideas

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• Opinion is the great, indeed the only coordinating force in our system.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Inspirational, Opinion, Force

  Woodrow Wilson, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Princeton University (1974). “The papers of Woodrow Wilson”

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