quotations about environment
That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.
PAUL BROOKS
The Pursuit of Wilderness
If you really think the environment is less important than the economy try holding your breathe while you count your money.
ANONYMOUS
Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value.
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Hot
I don't mean to imply that we are in imminent danger of being wiped off the face of the earth - at least, not on account of global warming. But climate change does confront us with profound new realities. We face these new realities as a nation, as members of the world community, as consumers, as producers, and as investors. And unless we do a better job of adjusting to these new realities, we will pay a heavy price. We may not suffer the fate of the dinosaurs. But there will be a toll on our environment and on our economy, and the toll will rise higher with each new generation.
EILEEN CLAUSSEN
speech, July 17, 2002
A strong, successful man is not the victim of his environment. He creates favorable conditions. His own inherent force and energy compel things to turn out as he desires. But a weak man is the victim of outside influences.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Progressive Business Man
Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.
DAVID EHRENFELD
The Arrogance of Humanism
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
GEORGE CARLIN
stand-up routine
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.
ANTON CHEKHOV
Uncle Vanya
The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers -- and thermonuclear weapons.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
foreword, Collected Stories
I look at my environment
And wonder where the fire went
What happened to everything we used to be?
LAURYN HILL
"The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill"
What people have begun to appreciate over the last 20 or 30 years is that the environment is, like a bathtub, of limited capacity. When humans were launched into space in the late 1960s, they -- and then we -- were for the first time able to view the planet Earth as a blue globe, utterly bounded in extent, moving in the infinite and hostile darkness of space. The limits of the environment became immediately clear.
NICHOLAS LOW
The Green City
When the well's dry, we know the worth of water.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
We cannot permit the environmental movement to shut down the United States. We cannot shut down the lives of many Americans by going to the extreme on the environment.
GEORGE BUSH
campaign rally, May 30, 1992
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.
GIL STERN
attributed, The Harper Book of Quotations
While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil. Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
attributed, Land Use
The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature--nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing.
LOUDON WAINWRIGHT
attributed, The Greatest Quotations of All Time
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.
ALDO LEOPOLD
A Sand County Almanac
I'm a product of my environment
My vocabulary's like licking the gutter
CIRCLE JERKS
"Product of My Environment"
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed