Online Environmental Forum - Click Here
- Back to Main Page
The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the theme of environmental security, environmental policy, environmental law, and technology. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?”
- Robert Redford
“The difficulty lies not in the new ideas but in the escaping the old ones.”
- John Maynard Keynes
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
- Ansel Adams
“If politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.”
- Bruce Sterling
“You can't get a guarantee that genes are going to turn on and off the way you want them to. You're dealing with life. It's too unpredictable.”
- Jeremy Rifkin
“What pleases me most is that sustainable development is on almost everybody's agenda now.”
- Maurice Strong
“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”
- Martin Luther King Jr.
“Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the "environmentalist" view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.”
- E. O. Wilson
“Government needs to be at least as good as any other sector in communication, and arguably should set new standards. It ought to be a sensitive and comprehensive listener. It must be an efficient and prompt disseminator of information. It has to answer questions accurately, honestly and completely. It must be accountable for what it does, prepared to explain and defend its decisions but also admit its mistakes.”
- The Phillis Report
“The overall view of the human genome project has been one of great excitement and positive press, but there are people who have concerns that are quite reasonable, and they are frightened of things they don't understand.”
- Thomas R. Cech
“The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing: you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to 'the others'. And they're changing dramatically.”
- Marshall McLuhan
“There is an increasing need to democratise the governance of science and technology, ensuring that it serves the public good rather than narrow economic interests.”
- Dr. Michel Pimbert
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
- Freeman Dyson
“Technology was developed to prevent exhausting labor. It is now dedicated to trivial conveniences.”
- B.F. Skinner
“In making any law, our chiefs must always consider three things: the effect of their decision on peace; the effect on the natural world; and the effect on seven generations in the future. We believe that all lawmakers should be required to think this way, that all constitutions should contain these rules.”
- Carol Jacobs
“There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.”
- Alfred North Whitehead
“Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten.”
- Neil Armstrong
“It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and reality of tomorrow.”
- Robert Goddard
“Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.”
- King James Bible, Proverb 29:18
“We must go through a natural revolution if we are to survive on earth. We need to change people's perceptions. If there's no environment, there's no human race. We are in a state of global denial.”
- Ted Turner
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
- Jane Goodall
“We seek a restorative justice, not a retributive
justice”
- Bishop Tutu
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
- Richard P. Feynman
“Through our reactions we create delusions. Without reactions the world becomes clear.”
- Buddha
“People are the quintessential element in all technology. Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.”
- Garrett Hardin
“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
- J.G. Ballard
“Nations whose feeling for nature dissipates because they destroy their homeland, carry the seeds of death in them; they only continue as a nation artificially. Nations with a strongly defined feeling for nature, like the Germans and the Slavs, overcome even the hardest blows and have an unlimited capacity for regeneration. Therefore a government that seeks to maintain the feeling for nature of its people is smart, and to that end no sacrifice is too large, no means too small, and everyone who helps with that serves his Völk.”
- Hermann Löns
“Nothing destroys authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power, pressed too far and relaxed too much.”
- Francis Bacon
“Every good movement passes through five stages, indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression, and respect.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“This is a country which stands tallest in troubled times, a country that clings to fundamental principles, cherishes its constitutional heritage, and rejects simple solutions that compromise the values that lie at the roots of our democratic system.”
- Thurgood Marshall