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The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the themes of biodiversity, natural environment, natural resources, and future generations. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”
- Native American Proverb
“What an extraordinary time to be alive. We’re the first people on our planet to have real choice: we can continue killing each other, wiping out other species, spoiling our nest. Yet on every continent a revolution in human dignity is emerging. It is re-knitting community and our ties to the earth. So we do have a choice. We can choose death; or we can choose life.”
- Frances Moore Lappe
“So the environment is not a luxury, not a Gucci accessory bag or a fancy silk tie affordable only when all other issues have been resolved.”
- Klaus Toepfer
“We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
- Wallace Stegner
“Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work.”
- Thomas E. Lovejoy
“Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live.”
- Holmes Rolston III
“Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.”
- God; Genesis 1:20-21
“God bless America. Let's save some of it.”
- Edward Abbey
“Many of the earth´s habitats, animals, plants, insects and even micro-organisms that we know to be rare may not be known at all by future generations. We have the capability and the responsibility to act; we must do so before it is too late.”
- Dalai Lama: Tenzin Gyatso
“This generation of politicians is the last generation who have it in their power to secure the future of our planet, to safeguard the health and livelihoods of millions of people and the habitats that sustain their lives. History will not forgive them if they fail to act.”
- Dr. Catarina Cardoso
“You must keep my decrees and my laws. And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.”
- God; Leviticus 18:25
“God does not play favorites. The difference between a flower or wildflower or weed is only a matter of human judgment.”
- John Joseph Price
“I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
“All good things are wild and free.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists solely for the convenience of man.”
- Rachel Carson
“We the undersigned, senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it, is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”
- 'Warning to Humanity', under the heading 'Warning', the statement signed by 1600 senior scientists from 70 countries including 102 Nobel Prize laureates on November 18, 1992.
“The more we exploit nature, the more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival.”
- Morris K. Udall
“Where the quality of life goes down for the environment, the quality of life goes down for humans.”
- George Holland
“We are cutting out our kidneys to enlarge our stomachs.”
- Eric Freyfogle
“If we do not begin to relate to the fact that the environment is an ultimate issue and act to preserve our essential ecosystems, we will most certainly lose our evolutionary potential.”
- Ted Danson
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or birds of the air and they will tell you; or speak to the earth and it will teach you; or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the lord has done this. In His hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”
- Job 12:7-10
“Environmentalism is no longer about wilderness protection; it's about saving the collective neck of humanity.”
- Michael Oppenheimer
“The value of biodiversity is more than the sum of its parts.”
- Byran G. Norton
“Just as Nature concentrates its greatest attention, not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species, so in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation – which, owing to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred – and more a matter of securing from the very start a better road for future development.”
- Adolf Hitler
“Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.”
- Robert H. Schuller
“It is the millions of acts by ordinary people that will eventually make a difference.”
- Hamish McRae
“When all else is lost, the future still remains.”
- Christian Nestell Bovee
“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.”
- Aldo Leopold
“Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.”
- 'Warning to Humanity', the opening paragraph, a statement signed by 1600 senior scientists from 70 countries including 102 Nobel Prize laureates on November 18, 1992.
“For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions and the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations.”
- Henry Betson