Pollution Quotes - Page 20

• We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Percent, Knows, Bits

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• The air is full of a farewell- deserted by the silver lake lies the wild world, overturned. Cities rise where the mountains fell, the furnace where the phoenix burned

  Kathleen Raine

  Lying, Farewell, Lakes

  Kathleen Raine (1989). “Selected Poems”, p.20, SteinerBooks

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• You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered.

  Joel Achenbach

  Men, Long, People

  "The Car of the Future". voices.washingtonpost.com. December 2, 2008.

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• If we're going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we're going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.

  Barack Obama

  Sky, Fuel, Earth

  "Obama rejects Keystone XL pipeline and hails US as leader on climate change" by Suzanne Goldenberg and Dan Roberts, www.theguardian.com. November 6, 2015.

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• The American people today are involved in a warfare more deadly than the war in Vietnam, but few of them seem aware of it and even fewer of them are doing anything about it. This is a war that is being waged against the American environment, against our lands, air, and water, which are the basis of that environment.

  Norman Cousins

  War, Air, Land

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• Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution. Two years ago, Pfiesteria outbreaks connected with wastes from industrial chicken factories forced the closure of two major tributaries of the Chesapeake and threatened Maryland's vital shellfish industry. Tyson Foods has polluted half of all streams in northwestern Arkansas with so much fecal bacteria that swimming is prohibited. Drugs and hormones needed to keep confined animals alive and growing are mainly excreted with the wastes and saturate local waterways.

  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

  Swimming, Animal, Agriculture

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• The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact it should be seen at the very center of the ecological crisis, as the cloud-covered Everest of which the more immediate, visible kinds of harm to the environment are the mere foothills.

  Jonathan Schell

  Ecosystems, Clouds, Environmental

  Jonathan Schell (2000). “The Fate of the Earth: And, The Abolition”, p.111, Stanford University Press

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• The reality of life is that we are exposed to a multiplicity of toxic substances.

  Al Meyerhoff

  Reality, Environmental, Toxic

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• With chemicals, it's shoot first and ask questions later.

  Al Meyerhoff

  Environmental, Firsts, Chemicals

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• If humanity today succeeds in combining the new scientific capacities with a strong ethical dimension, it will certainly be able to promote the environment as a home and a resource for...all...and will be able to eliminate the causes of pollution and to guarantee adequate conditions of hygiene and health for small groups as well as for vast human settlements.

  Pope John Paul II

  Strong, Home, Hygiene

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• The whole concept of higher education is negated unless the sole criterion used to determine if students qualify is the grades they score on standardized tests. Education is purely an issue of learning - we can no longer afford to have it polluted by damn politics. Leave pollution up to the politicians

  Ray Bradbury

  Issues, Tests, Students

  Ray Bradbury, Steven L. Aggelis (2004). “Conversations with Ray Bradbury”, p.160, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Could we chose to amend the rules of the game to create a society that values people over profits, life over pollution, mutual care over guns and prisons, vision over dysfunction?

  Vicki Robin

  Gun, Games, Dysfunction

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• We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.

  Aldo Leopold

  Respect, Nature, Community Living

  Aldo Leopold (1989). “A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There”, p.8, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume - a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.

  Ivan Illich

  Believe, Independent, Technology

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• Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees.

  Ronald Reagan

  Humorous, Air, Tree

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• As we gain satisfaction from artificial substitutes for nature we forget that there is no known substitute for Nature, the real thing and its eons of intelligent, life supportive, experience. Each substitute we create falls short of nature's balanced perfection, thus producing our pollution, garbage and relationship conflicts.

  Michael J Cohen

  Real, Fall, Intelligent

  Michael J. Cohen (2003). “The Web of Life Imperative: Regenerative Ecopsychology Techniques That Help People Think in Balance with Natural Systems”, p.84, Trafford Publishing

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• From my travels around the world I have seen how much damage and pollution is done by the careless disposal of waste. It is also evident that we in the West produce far more and throw away far more than the developing world, almost without thinking

  Michael Palin

  Thinking, Done, World

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• ...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.

  Russell Kirk

  Degradation, Conservative, Countryside

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• We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Past, Thinking, Air

  Nixon, Richard M. (1971). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1970”, p.13, Best Books on

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• We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor's yard.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Air, Water, Environmental

  "Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1970".

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• The preservation of parks, wilderness, and wildlife has also aided liberty by keeping alive the 19th century sense of adventure and awe with which our forefathers greeted the American West. Many laws protecting environmental quality have promoted liberty by securing property against the destructive trespass of pollution. In our own time, the nearly universal appreciation of these preserved landscapes, restored waters, and cleaner air through outdoor recreation is a modern expression of our freedom and leisure to enjoy the wonderful life that generations past have built for us.

  Ronald Reagan

  Appreciation, Adventure, Past

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• I'm proud of having been one of the first to recognize that states and the federal government have a duty to protect our natural resources from the damaging effects of pollution that can accompany industrial development.

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Development, Proud

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1982). “Ronald Reagan”

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• Those concerns of a national character-such as air and water pollution that do not respect state boundaries, or the national transportation system, or efforts to safeguard your civil liberties-must, of course, be handled on the national level.

  Ronald Reagan

  Character, Air, Water

  Ronald Reagan, Michael Reagan (2016). “The Last Best Hope: The Greatest Speeches of Ronald Reagan”, p.55, Humanix Books

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• Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.

  Barry Commoner

  Technology, Development, Prevention

  Interview with Alan Hall, www.scientificamerican.com. June 23, 1997.

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• I became an actor at a very young age, but I also had a deep respect for nature and I think I was sort of a little biologist when I was younger. I watched documentaries on rainforest pollution and the loss of species and habitats for animals around the world. It affected me in a very hardcore, emotional way when I was younger. So, later in life I wanted to continue that path more and investigate and learn more about ecological issues.

  Leonardo DiCaprio

  Loss, Emotional, Thinking

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