Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him? – Pierre Troubetzkoy
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. – Richard P. Feynman
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. – Chief Seattle, 1855
Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations. – David Gerrold
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. – Albert Schweitzer, quoted in James Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer
The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children. – Paul R. Ehrlich
Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth. – Ian McHarg
The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself. – Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953
Every day is Earth Day. – Author Unknown
Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust? – Lane Olinghouse
Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake…. During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast. – William Rathje, The Economist, 8 September 1990
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
How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?… Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore. – Anonymous Wintu Woman
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. – Carl Sagan
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. – Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848
Man maketh a death which Nature never made. – Edward Young
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. – Rachel Carson
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west… keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. – Mahatma Gandhi
It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times…. What the Dickens is going on here? – Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in National Academy
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom – and lakes die. – Gil Stern
