Environmental Quotes

120 Environmental Quotes

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[On promoting recycling] You know, the purpose of all those Moon walks was to take the garbage out.
Neil Armstrong

The very success of the human species over eons of time now threatens our extinction. It is the drive that made for success that must now be curbed, redirected or released by expansion into a new world ecology… If we can find people skilful enough to reach the Moon, we sure can find people to solve our environmental problems.
Neil Armstrong

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

As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.
Rachel Carson

Nature has given us life, at interest, like money, no day being fixed for its return.
Cicero

We need to appreciate that a species, of whatever form, is life, is a unique manifestation of life, the final product of some evolutionary development.
Irston R Barnes

I detect an atmosphere of hubris. That’s when you laugh at the gods.
George E Brown

A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage.
William Blake

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

Let the river roll which way it will, cities will rise on its banks.
Ralph Waldo Emerson



The tender ecology of the seashore is being invaded by a host of pollutants that directly threaten marine life.
Edward Wenk

The use of the sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, for as much as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession thereof.
Elizabeth I of England

Willful waste brings woeful want.
Anonymous proverb

A city, like a living thing, is a united and continuous whole.
Plutarch

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

Acid rain spares nothing. What has taken humankind decades to build and nature millennia to evolve is being impoverished and destroyed in a matter of a few years-a mere blink in geologic time.
Don Hinrichsen

It is clear that small changes in the past 10,000 years had very large ecological effects and they can happen bloody fast. The end of the ice age took less than a century-kapow! It’s fast, and that worries me because we don’t know but what in a few years we could have a significant change that would disrupt our entire climate.
Reid A Bryson

The landscapes were like a violin bow that played upon my soul.
Stendhal

In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.
Baba Dioum

Conservation cannot be imposed from above. It must have the support of the people.
Michael Werikhe



We are hooked like junkies, dependent on the drug of wasteful consumption.
Raymond F Dasmann

Materialism simply cannot survive the transition to a sustainable world.
Lester Brown

One way to be rich is not to want anything.
Kenneth E Boulding

To relieve an animal of pain or danger is a biblical law.
Talmud

It’s the rich who wreck the environment … occupy much more space, consume more of each natural resource, disturb ecology more, litter the landscape … and create more pollution.
Jean Mayer

One can exist for days without food or water or companionship or sex or mental stimulation, but life without air is measured in seconds. In seconds.
Caskie Stinnet

The Ford engineering staff, although mindful that automobile engines produce exhaust gases, feels these waste vapors are dissipated in the atmosphere quickly and do not present an air pollution problem.
Dan J Chabek

We must give (dolphins) rights as individuals under our laws (with) complete freedom of the waters of the earth.
John C Lilly

I have an ‘Ecology Now’ sticker on a car that drips oil everywhere it’s parked.
Mark Sagoff

Human life cannot be nurtured, nursed, and sustained unless we nurse and sustain the ecological habitat within the womb of which we all reside.
Henryk Skolimowski



Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Ayn Rand

Man is the original and basic pollutant.
J Bockris

We talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves, first, to her ways.
Clarence Day

Nature is the art of God.
Dante Alighieri

The environment is all just a matter of attitude. In fact, you can think of your attitude as your ‘inner environment,’ which can be as fresh and green and perky as you like, even when the Great Lakes turn to solid waste and the Himalayas are placed on smog alert.
Barbara Ehrenreich

Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.
Samuel Johnson

I must confess hat I am not romance-hit about nature. The earth, the sea, and say (when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in.
Charles Lamb

We can all see profit in conservation practice, but the profit accrues to society rather than to the individual. This, of course, explains the trend, at this moment, to wish the whole job on the government.
Aldo Leopold

The greatest pollution we have is the government itself.
Anonymous

Clean air is an area where the Federal government will wimp out with the slightest bit of pressure.
Patricia Schroeder



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