To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. – Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907

So bleak is the picture… that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. – Philip Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature. – Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1964