Nature and Climate Change Quotes
Top 25 Nature and Climate Change
Quotes
No 1 (Best quote!)
Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
- Rachel Carson (1907-64),
American environmentalist, pictured right.
No 2
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
(from the 1970 song Big Yellow Tax)
- Joni Mitchell (1943- ), pictured right. Canadian singer.
No 3
We have not inherited the earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.
- Native American proverb.
So Crazy Horse (c.1849–77), pictured right, the Native
American leader, says:
One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk,
No 4
Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another.
- Edmund Burke (1729–97), Irish-born
politician and philosopher, pictured right.
No 5
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not every man’s greed.
- Mahatma (Mohandas) Gandhi
(1869-1948), Indian leader and philosopher, pictured right.
No 6
The road we have been travelling is...a smooth highway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end
lies disaster.
- Rachel Carson (1907-64),
American environmentalist, pictured right.
No 7
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
(from the 1945 poem Song of the Open Road)
- Ogden Nash (1902-71), pictured right above, American poet.
No 8
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
(from the 1804 poem Daffodils)
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850),
pictured right above, English poet.
No 9
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
(from the 1803 poem Auguries of Innocence)
- William Blake (1757-1827), pictured right above, English writer.
No 10
What is the use of a house if you haven’t a tolerable planet to put it on?,
- Henry David Thoreau
(1817-62), American philosopher, pictured right.
Thomas Friedman, pictured right, in Hot, Flat and
Crowded (2008), asks a similar question:
What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can't see anything green during the
day?
No 11
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe...the starry heaven above me and the moral
law within me.
-Immanuel Kant (1724–1804),
German philosopher, pictured right.
No 12
Human subtlety…will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature,
because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Italian
painter and designer, pictured right.
No 13
Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.
- Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), Russian writer, pictured right.
No 14
Since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being
with the minimum of consumption.
- Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher, pictured right,
Small is Beautiful
(1973).
No 15
Mankind has probably done more damage to the earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human
history.
- Jacques Cousteau (1910–97), French underwater explorer, pictured right.
No 16
Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never
better than knowledge.
- Enrico Fermi (1901–54), Italian-born American atomic physicist, pictured right.
No 17
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself: What if I had never seen this before? What if I know I would never
see it again?
- Rachel Carson (1907-64),
American environmentalist, pictured right.
No 18
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44), French writer, pictured right.
No 19
We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and
future generations.
- Barack Obama (1961- ), pictured right, in his
Second Inaugural Address (2013)
The English scientist,Stephen Hawking
(1942- ), pictured right , explains what might happen, if we do nothing:
By 2600, the world population would be standing shoulder to shoulder and the electricity consumed would make the
earth glow red hot.
No 20
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.
(from the 1819 poem To Autumn) - John Keats (1795-1821), pictured right above, English
poet.
No 21
The power of the consumer gives us a lever to address one of the greatest challenges of our time: climate
change.
- Terry Leahy (1956-), chief executive of Tesco,
1997-2011, pictured right.
No 22
We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
- Stephen Hawking (1942-), English
scientist, pictured right
No 23
How beautiful mankind is! O brave new world that hath such people in ’t!,
(Miranda in The Tempest)
- William Shakespeare
(1564-1616), English playwright, pictured right.
No 24
We live in a world dominated by greed. We have allowed the interests of capital to outweigh the interests of
human beings and our Earth.
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931- ), pictured right, South African church leader.
No 25
If we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten
life itself.
- Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher, pictured right ,
in Small is
Beautiful (1973)
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