Environmental Quotes

120 Environmental Quotes

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We are embarked on the most colossal ecological experiment of all time; doubling the concentration in the atmosphere of an entire planet of one of its most important gases; and we really have little idea of what might happen.
Paul A Colinvaux

What is the earth but a lump of clay surrounded by water?
Bhartrhari

Those interested in the long-term health of the land need only stand on the edge of a stream after a rain and watch a plasma boil and turn in the powerful current below and then realize that the vigorous production of our fields is, unfortunately, temporary. Since we initiated the split with nature some 10,000 years ago by embracing enterprise in food production, we have yet to develop an agriculture as sustainable as the nature we destroy.
Wes Jackson

Groundwater is the most mysterious part of our planet’s hydrologic cycle. Many people imagine groundwater as pristine underground rivers that magically clean themselves of contaminants and supply us with an abundance of fresh, drinkable water. In the real world, undergraound rivers exist only infrequently.
Ann Maest

First I thought I was fighting for the rubber tappers, then I thought I was fighting for the Amazon, then I realized I was fighting for humanity.
Chico Mendes

Water is the eye of a landscape.
Vincent Lean

Love nature like a neighbour or relative.
John Carmody

Man can be adapted to anything-to the dirt and noise of New York City-and that is what is tragic. As we can accept worse and worse conditions, we don’t realize that there is something worse than extinction-the progressive degradation of human life.
Rene Dubos

In an age marked by an overabundance of waste, regulation, and litigation, here is an industry (hazardous-waste cleanup) that thrives on all three.
Bruce Stutz

Perhaps our age will be known to the future historian as the age of the bulldozer and the exterminator; and in many parts of the country the building of a highway has about the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb.
Lewis Mumford



If a man kills a tree before its time, it is as though he had murdered a soul.
Nahman Bratzlav

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn’t be so grossly over-populated as it is now.
W Somerset Maugham

That streak of road, fired like an arrow through the heart of the jungle, is being lethal to the old kingdom.
Anthony Smith

And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolation of many generations.
Bible

The air (in Manchester, England) is so polluted that you wake up in the morning listening to the birds cough.
Anonymous

Too many people brings suffering to the land, and the land returns its suffering to the people.
O Soemarwoto

And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.
Bible

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.
Thomas Jefferson

Alternative energy is a future idea whose time is past. Renewable energy is a future idea whose time has come.
Bill Penden

At best, it means we will run out of energy a little more slowly.
Ronald Reagan



When I cross those pleasant forests which I have saved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young tress, which I have set out with my own hands, I feel as if I had had some small share in improving the climate, and that if mankind is happy a thousand years from now I shall have been partly responsible in my small way for their happiness. When I plant a young birch tree and see it budding and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride.
Anton Chekhov

(Man’s) own past is full of clear and somber warnings-vanished civilizations buried, like dead flies in lacquer, beneath their own dust and mud.
Paul Sears

It is not merely soil, nor plant, nor animal, nor weather which we need to know better, but chiefly man himself.
Paul Sears

In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.
Iroquois Confederation

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.
Marya Mannes

Men are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow.
J Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

We cannot continue to depend on the price and supply whims of others. The Congress cannot drift, dawdle and debate forever with America’s future.
Gerald R Ford

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
D H Lawrence

How can the spirit of the earth like the White man? … Everywhere the White man has touched, it is sore.
Wintu Indian

The problem isn’t a shortage of fuel, it’s a surplus of government.
Ronald Reagan



Underfishing is a sin of omission, overfishing a crime against humanity.
Pedro Ojeda Paullada

If there is a just God, how humanity would writhe in its attempt to justify its treatment of animals.
Isaac Asimov

Nothing is less known; nothing more neglected. The forest is a gift of nature which it is sufficient to accept just as it comes from her hands.
Georges-Louis Leclerc

What will the axemen do, when they have cut their way from sea to sea?
James Fenimore Cooper

Environmental extremists wouldn’t let you build a house unless it looked like a bird’s nest.
Ronald Reagan

We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.
Walter Lippmann

The Gaia hypothesis, that Earth is a single huge organism intentionally creating an optimum environment for itself, has been made palatable; interesting science is coming of it.
Richard A Kerr

Think globally, but act locally.
Rene Dubos

Initially, your children may not know how successful World Environment Day was. But eventually, they’ll find out for themselves.
Carlos Salinas de Gortari

We should not put our country in the position of exercising environmental imperialism.
Jay Vroom



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