Green Quotes

Memorable Quotations around a Tree of Life

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

-- T.S. Elliot

○ "In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but what we refuse to destroy." -- John C. Sawhill, Nature Conservancy

○ "We are already well into a new geological era, the Anthropocene, where human interference is the dominant factor in nearly every planetary ecosystem, to the detriment of perhaps all of them." -- Mark Lynas, Six Degrees

○ "Most people walking around in a mall or on a college campus are carrying on them better technology than the entire U.S. government had when it put a man on the moon. Each one of us is a walking technological superpower.... Given the capacities available to us, our wildest dreams and biggest hopes are probably too small." -- Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy

○ "In 'Laudato Si', I call for a courageous and responsible effort to 'redirect our steps', and to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity. I am convinced that we can make a difference and I have no doubt that the United States – and this Congress – have an important role to play." -- Pope Francis, Speech to the U.S. Congress, Sept 2015

/ Alphabetical /

/ A & B

○ "Cette beauté est faite de nuances subtiles, d'un équilibre miraculeux de teintes resplendissantes et douces. Seul un enfant dans son innocence pourrait appréhender la pureté et la splendeur de cette vision." (This beauty consists of subtle nuances, as in the miraculous balance of soft and brilliant hues. Only a child in its innocence could apprehend the purity and splendor of this vision.) -- Astronaut Patrick Baudry describing the Earth from space

○ “Economy and environment are the same thing. That is the rule of nature.” -- Mollie Beattie NYT Obit Running w/ Wolves & Bears

○ “No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people. And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” -- Wendell Berry

○ “Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. -- Wendell Berry

"People stand themselves next to the righteous

They believe the things they say are true

They speak in terms of what divides us

To justify the violence they do

But it is one, it is one

One world spinning 'round the sun

Wherever it is you call home

Whatever country you come from

It is one"

-- Jackson Browne, musician, "It is One"

○ “Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” -- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

○ “Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.” -- Jimmy Carter

/ C & D

○ "There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Russia, no China, no Taiwan. Rivers flow unimpeded across the swaths of continents. The persistent tides, the pulse of the sea do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth." --Jacques-Yves Cousteau, oceanographer

○ "Wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions.” -- Jared Diamond

/ E

○ "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

/ F

○ "We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves cooperatively, sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth.... We are not going to be able to operate our spaceship earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common." -- Buckminster Fuller

/ G

○ "I am part and parcel of the whole and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity." -- Gandhi

/ H & I

○ "How can we fret and stew sub specie aeternitatis - under the calm gaze of ancient Tao? The salt of the sea is in our blood; the calcium of the rocks is in our bones; the genes of ten thousand generations of stalwart progenitors are in our cells. The sun shines and we smile. The winds rage and we bend before them. The blossoms open and we rejoice. Earth is our long home." -- Stewart W. Holmes

/ J & K

○ "The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined non-conformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been non-conformists." -- Martin Luther King Jr

○ "After an orange cloud -- formed as a result of a dust storm over the Sahara and caught up by air currents -- reached the Philippines and settled there with rain, I understood that we are all sailing in the same boat." -- Astronaut Vladimir Kovalyonok

○ "I think we're in a new era where the advancing tide is towards human unity, where people all around the world want to come together. The United States is in a position where it can lead the way towards that and it can do it in practical ways by affirming the power of the United Nations so that the international process makes decisions on international security." --Dennis Kucinich, former US Congress representative

/ L

○ "Aristippus said that a wise man's country was the world." -- Diogenes Laertius, 13 xiii, Circa 200 A.D.

/ M & N

○ “There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.” -- Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

○ "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." -- Herman Melville

○ "In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch." -- Astronaut Edgar Mitchell

○ “Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.” -- George Monbiot

○ “A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.” -- Elizabeth Moon

○ "When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." -- John Muir

○ “For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.” -- Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

/ O & P

○ "The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion." -- Thomas Paine

○ “No matter how many toys we amass we leave them behind when we die, just as we leave a broken environment, an economy that only benefits the richest, and a legacy of empowering greed over goodness. It is now time to commit to following a new path.” -- John Perkins

/ Q & R

○ "Our goals are the same as those of the U.N.'s founders, who sought to replace a world at war with one where the rule of law would prevail, where human rights were honored, where development would blossom, where conflict would give way to freedom from violence." -- Ronald Reagan, Address by the US President to the UN General Assembly

/ S

○ "Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together--surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

○ "Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

○ "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

○ “Quand on a terminé sa toilette du matin, il faut faire soigneusement la toilette de la planète.” -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

○ “David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss.” -- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

○ "Viewing the Earth from space, you see a singleness and unity to it all that we never perceive in the press of daily life. It seems such a vivid unity that surely it must be rooted some reality, and you wonder why this unity isn't more the reality of everyday human life on earth. You wonder if it could ever be so unified, and you return determined to do whatever you can to make it so - even a bit." -- Astronaut Kathryn Sullivan

/ T & U

○ "What good is a house, if you haven't got a decent planet to put it on?" -- Henry David Thoreau

○ "My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together." -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

/ V, W, X, Y, Z

○ “Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend.” -- Edward O. Wilson

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