Browsing Topic Best Environmental Quotes

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

Forests are the lungs of our land.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be too late. The future is not determined and it lies in our own hands.

Boundaries don’t protect rivers, people do.

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don’t stop for customs inspections and microbes don’t carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

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.

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Be gentle with the earth.

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

I believe that capitalism, at least how it’s used by major corporations, and environmental concerns are in opposition. To be ecologically aware, productivity of many things would slow down at least for awhile. Stockholders don’t want to hear about the saving of the whales or some stream in Kentucky. They want a return on their investment.

How endless is that volume which God hath written of the world! Every creature is a letter, every day a new page.

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.

A building that has great environmental responsibility is a political animal in a way because it becomes promotional of a cause. I think that kind of advocacy through architecture is really good.

The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.

When the people become involved in their government, government becomes more accountable, and our society is stronger, more compassionate, and better prepared for the challenges of the future.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

I don’t want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry – an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.

The world was created because God willed it, but why did He will it? Judaism has maintained, in all of its versions, that this world is the arena that God created for man, half beast and half angel; to prove that he could be a moral being…man was given dominion over nature, but he was commanded to behave towards the rest of creation with justice and compassion. Man lives, always, in tension between his power and the limits set by his conscience.

A food waste reduction hierarchy-feeding people first, then animals, then recycling, then composting-serves to show how productive use can be made of much of the excess food that is currently contributing to leachate and methane formation in landfills.

Every country-or at least every country that is fit for habitation-has its own rivers; and every river has its own quality; and it is the part of wisdom to know and love as many as you can, seeing each in the fairest possible light, and receiving from each the best that it has to give.

Self-centeredness will bring on the destruction of our world. National pride separates people. All people need the same thing. When you really get down to it, you’ll find that all people need good food, clean water, clean air, and a decent environment, meaning education as to how to relate to one another and to avoid conflict, how to accept the differences where different people draw different conclusions.

Human behavior is subject to the same laws as any other natural phenomenon. Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture. No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns. If the environment is unaltered, similar behavior will reoccur.

If our system continues without modification involving environmental and social concern, we will face an economic and social break down.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

Man was the outlaw, the rebel, the distorted shape that scarred the earth, the voice that silenced the music of Eden, the hand that raised up obscenities and blasphemies. Man was the pariah-dog, the moral leper in this translucent mirror of Heaven. He was the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent, the challenger against God. He was the assassin of the saints and the prophets, for they spoke of what he WOULD NOT HEAR, in the darkness of his spirit!

The specific danger is us; we are rampant; this earth is our only friend; we are destroying it increment by increment at a horrific rate. We must understand that we can’t buy it back.

The conservative goal has been the Third Worldization of the United States: an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force; a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes; the privatization or elimination of human services; the elimination of public education for low-income people; the easing of restrictions against child labor; the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries; the breaking of labor unions; and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations.

What is the environmental policy of the Republican Party? When I ask that question, I get a blank stare, if I’m president of the United States, we’re going to address climate change and CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way.

The businessmen of the world who are not taking environmental matters seriously are just wasting money, aside from damaging the environment it’s wasting money and in this economic climate you just can’t afford to do that.