Environment Quotes

• 

  The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world-the very nature of its life.

  Rachel Carson

  Nature, Men, Sea

  Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.6, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  183 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

  Steve Jobs

  Inspirational, Motivational, Leadership

  Steve Jobs (0101). “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, p.72, Prabhat Prakashan

  123 Copy quote

  Show source

• Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Nature

  151 Copy quote
• 

  Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Summer, Peace

  134 Copy quote

• When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

  John Muir

  Inspirational, Peace, Nature

  61 Copy quote

• All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, through the influence of the environment in which their race has long been placed, and hence through the influence of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Sex, Loss, Science

  14 Copy quote

• The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.

  Jean Houston

  History, Challenges, Humanity

  Jean Houston (2016). “Myth, Consciousness, and Psychic Research”, p.10, Cosimo, Inc.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Environmental, India, World

  Mahatma Gandhi (1965). “My Picture of Free India”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.

  Rene Dubos

  Destiny, Environmental, Strikes

  27 Copy quote

• Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.

  Rene Dubos

  Running, Nature, Environmental

  7 Copy quote

• The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally.

  Dalai Lama

  Nature, Environmental, Natural

  6 Copy quote

• When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce.

  Paul Hawken

  Dark, Order, Environmental

  6 Copy quote

• Birds ... are sensitive indicators of the environment, a sort of "ecological litmus paper," ... The observation and recording of bird populations over time lead inevitably to environmental awareness and can signal impending changes.

  Roger Tory Peterson

  Change, Science, Bird

  Roger Tory Peterson (2012). “Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Pennsylvania”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science

  George Santayana

  Running, Science, Errors

  George Santayana (2004). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.22, Cosimo, Inc.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.

  Aldo Leopold

  Science, Average, Civilization

  Aldo Leopold (1937). “Game Management 118”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish.

  Carl Rogers

  Change, Science, Men

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.348, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• I feel more confident than ever that the power to save the planet rests with the individual consumer.

  Denis Hayes

  Environmental, Economy, Individual

  33 Copy quote

• There is a great need for the introduction of new values in our society, where bigger is not necessarily better, where slower can be faster, and where less can be more.

  Gaylord Nelson

  Earth Day, Environmental, Needs

  Gaylord Nelson, Paul A. Wozniak, Susan M. Campbell (2002). “Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise”, p.175, Univ of Wisconsin Press

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.

  John Clapham

  Progress, Society, Environmental

  45 Copy quote

• The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Eugenics, Fusion, Energy

  7 Copy quote

• Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

  Al Gore

  Eugenics, Civilization, Energy

  Al Gore (2013). “Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose”, p.234, Routledge

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• When you defile the pleasant streams,
  And the wild bird's abiding place,
  You massacre a million dreams,
  And cast your spittle in God's face

  John Drinkwater

  Dream, Nature, Bird

  John Drinkwater (1919). “Poems, 1908-1919”

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an over-all environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.

  Stewart Udall

  Nature, Land, America

  Stewart L. Udall (1963). “The Quiet Crisis”

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?

  Gunter Grass

  Deny, Has Beens, Destroyed

  19 Copy quote

• The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues - self-restraint.

  Edwin Way Teale

  Fighting, Self, Wild Beauty

  Edwin Way Teale (1987). “Circle of the seasons: the journal of a naturalist's year”, Olympic Marketing Corp

  9 Copy quote

  Show source