Quotations about the Environment

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




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




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




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, 1971




Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find.  ~Quoted in Time




Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.  ~William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990




When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50.  When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.  ~Pat Brown, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985




Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.  ~Henrik Tikkanen




I'm not an environmentalist.  I'm an Earth warrior.  ~Darryl Cherney, quoted inSmithsonian, April 1990




I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security.  Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad.  Otherwise what is there to defend?  ~Robert Redford, Yosemite National Park dedication, 1985




Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated