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Eco Quotes offers an inspiring collection of ecological wisdom—environmental quotes, nature observations, ecology quotations and other Earth-loving quips, aphorisms and sayings—from many of the greatest environmental thinkers and eco activists in history.
 Live simply that others may simply live. - Mohandas K. Gandhi
Mankind’s irrational destruction of nature bothers me a lot. Mankind is slowly committing suicide—or not so slowly: each day it accelerates—producing all kinds of wastes: corporal, industrial, atomic, poisoning the earth, the sea and the air. He destroys the very environment that gives him sustenance. Centuries and centuries of civilization to arrive at this. What a piece of work is man! No other animal would be so stupid. Plagues of locusts are sporadic, they have a limit…” - Luis Bunuel, 1977
The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world - the very nature of its life. - Rachel Carson (1907-1964), Silent Spring
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau
We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do. - Barbara Ward, Only One Earth, 1972
Only when the last tree has been cut down, / Only when the last river has been poisoned, / Only when the last fish has been caught, / Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten. - Native American Cree Tribe Prophecy
Never, no never, did nature say one thing and wisdom say another. - Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1797.
We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can we resent a life we've created ourselves? Who's to blame, who's to credit but us? Who can change it, anytime we wish, but us? - Richard Bach
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. – Edward O. Wilson
Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature. - Dave Foreman
We won't have a society if we destroy the environment. - Margaret Mead
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. - Ansel Adams
People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes. - Elizabeth Kolbert
The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated. - Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Saturday Review, June 8, 1963.
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from. - Terry Tempest Williams, testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Forest & Public Lands Management regarding the Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995. Washington, D.C. July 13, 1995 |
