There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all.
Robert Orben
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
Aldous Huxley
The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.
Patrick Young
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Richard Feynman
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
Steven Wright
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Douglas Adams
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923
There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
Genesis 1:26 (New International Version)
It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.
Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February 1990
Modern technology
Owes ecology
An apology.
Alan M. Eddison
Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find.
Quoted in Time
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
Henrik Tikkanen
The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth - men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air - for I am grieved that I have made them."
Genesis 6:5-7 (New International Version)
We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!
Paul MacCready, Jr.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
Native American Proverb
You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it. We are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem.
William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times, 30 November 1988
There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
Marshall McLuhan, 1964
The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
Ralph Nader, quoted in Linda Botts, ed., Loose Talk, 1980
The packaging for a microwavable "microwave" dinner is programmed for a shelf life of maybe six months, a cook time of two minutes and a landfill dead-time of centuries.
David Wann, Buzzworm, November 1990
By wisdom the LORD laid the earth's foundations, by understanding he set the heavens in place;
Proverbs 3:19 (New International Version)
Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they're killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? "Sweetheart, let's make up. Have this deceased squirrel."
The Washington Post
When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.
David Orr
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?
Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, November 1939
In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.
Ellen DeGeneres
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.
Ross Perot
We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them. We say we love trees, yet we cut them down. And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are loved.
Author Unknown
Take nothing but pictures.
Leave nothing but footprints.
Kill nothing but time.
Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society
Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away.
Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871
The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it.
Chinese Proverb
Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, was a major factor in the development of the Western worldview.... A basic Christian belief was that God gave humans dominion over creation, with the freedom to use the environment as they saw fit. Another important Judeo-Christian belief predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in the future. One interpretation of this belief is that the Earth is only a temporary way station on the soul's journey to the afterlife. Because these beliefs tended to devalue the natural world, they fostered attitudes and behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment.
Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996
He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
Psalm 104:5 (New International Version)
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.
Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech, Argonne National Laboratory, 1969
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.
Charles Haas
We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," 1967
The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.
René Dubos, The Wooing of Earth, 1980
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air.
Changing Times magazine
The UN said that cattle rearing is more harmful than all transport. I thought that was shocking.
Paul McCartney
It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.
Malcolm Forbes
The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it
Psalm 24:1 (New International Version)
Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Don Marquis