Environment Quotes

116 Environment Quotes

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All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle

Continue to contaminate your own bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
Chief Seattle

A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place.
George Washington Carver

Nature study is agriculture, and agriculture is nature study – if properly taught.
George Washington Carver

Environmentalists make terrible neighbours but great ancestors.
David Brower

All things in nature work silently. They come into being and possess nothing. They fulfil their function and make no claim. All things alike do their work, and then we see them subside. When they have reached their bloom, each returns to its origin…. This reversion is an eternal law. To know that law is wisdom.
Lao Tsu

We shall never understand the natural environment until we can see it as a living organism.
Paul Brooks

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
Mohandas K Gandhi

Mining is like a search-and destroy mission.
Stewart L Udall



Earth is probably the lost paradise.
Federico Garcia Lorca

There is a growing consensus that control over land use is probably the most important single factor in improving the quality of the environment in the United States.
Council on Environmental Quality

If you don’t like diversity, drop dead.
Byron Kennard

Fresh air keeps the doctor poor.
Danish Proverb

You see, in the end, copper and oil come out of our minds. That’s really where they are.
Julian L Simon

Since the land is the parent, let the citizens take care of her more carefully than children do their mother.
Plato

Where there is no intelligence, there is no stupidity.
Hellstrom Chronicles

Development is a means of exchanging the indispensable for the superfluous.
The Ecologist

In all things of nature there is something of the marvellous.
Aristotle

The supreme reality of our time is … the vulnerability of our planet.
John F Kennedy



We have not inherited the world from our forefathers - we have borrowed it from our children.
Kashmiri proverb

Conscious, critical and active people are a prerequisite for progress.
Olof Palme

The land is like a woman’s breast: useful as well as pleasing.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Nature is a hanging judge.
Anonymous

We’re all living in a chemical soup.
Lance A Wallace

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
Aldo Leopold

Constraints are set by political and economic, not ecological or physical, factors.
William W Murdoch

Ecologists believe that a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand.
Stanley C Pearson

[Forests are] the ‘longs’ of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
Franklin D Roosevelt

Nature is not benevolent; with ruthless indifference she makes all things serve their purpose.
Lao Tsu



We divide the world into the developed countries and the developing countries. I would rather call them ‘misdeveloped’ countries.
Jose A Lutzenberger

The ultimate irony would be if the world would not end.
Anonymous Irish priest

Laws change; people die; the land remains.
Abraham Lincoln

One man’s conservation is all too frequently another man’s unemployment.
Mike McCormack

Strip mining is like taking seven or eight stiff drinks: you are riding high as long as the coal lasts, but the hangover comes when the coal is gone, the land is gone, the jobs are gone, and the bitter truth of the morning after leaves a barren landscape and a mouth full of ashes.
Ken Hechler

Wilful waste brings woeful want.
Anonymous proverb

You need free trade just as you need clean air to breathe.
Helmut Kohl

The irony of the matter is that future generations do not have a vote. In effect, we hold their proxies.
Charles J Hitch

Discovering a workable definition of environmental law is a little bit like the search for truth: the closer you get, the more elusive it becomes.
William H Rogers

In the matter of making strange bedfellows, ecology may outdistance politics.
Douglas M Costle



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