Environmental Quotes

120 Environmental Quotes

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The first and greatest knowledge, and also common to all men, is the division and order of our environment.
Polybius

Our government … is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificent estate in perfect order, and then has left his fields and meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted.
John Muir

You can’t outrun an environmentalist to the left… (T)hey will always stay ahead of you and demand more from you.
James G Watt

I don’t think they will be happy until the White House looks like a bird’s nest.
Ronald Reagan

Environmentalism itself, properly viewed, is not an obstructionist philosophy but rather an expression of purpose, yearning and rising expectations, another chapter in the saga of human progress.
Samuel C Florman

In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with the objects of creation, there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break forth into the light and which will be the corollary and complement to human ethics.
Victor Hugo

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather

We used to be hunter-gatherers, now we’re shopper-borrowers.
Robin Williams

I would suggest it is a good way to manage a fish hatchery but a lousy way to manage an environment.
Hans Martin

Saying sulfates do not cause acid rain is the same as saying that smoking does not cause lung cancer.
Drew Lewis



It’s quite clear that consumers are now almost more aware of the packaging than the product.
John Elkington

We’ll never know the worth of water till the well go dry.
Scottish proverb

As the man is worth, his land is worth.
R C Trench

We can’t keep studying this thing to death: we’re got to do something about it.
Drew Lewis

Forestry is the preservation of forests by wise use.
Theodore Roosevelt

Who can describe the sentiment one feels when entering forests as old as the world, forests which alone provide an idea of the creation, as it left the hands of God?
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand

The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we truly live.
Richard Jefferies

Nature never breaks her own laws.
Leonardo da Vinci

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That fish which is bred in the dirt will always taste of the mud.
William Clowes



Earth gives life and seeks the man who walks gently upon it.
Hopi Legend

Less is more.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

(Water is) the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.
Jean Giraudoux

One way to be rich is not to want anything.
Kenneth E Boulding

The Earth is our Mother, and we are all her children.
Hindu proverb

A developed Agriculture is a fabulous polluter; As development gets faster, then the problem gets acuter. We are loading up the planet with a lot of nitric trash, And if nitrogen falls off its cycle-wow! Is that a crash.
Kenneth E Boulding

Holy Mother Earth, the trees and all nature, are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds.
Winnebago saying

Mother Nature Says: ‘Clean Up Your Room’
Anonymous T-shirt slogan

This is not dead land, it is only thirsty land.
Frances Marion

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
Johannes Kepler



The smart ones are going green, the dumb ones are not, and the foolish ones are pretending.
David Krentz

We are mining the soil of its fertility, and are draining oil and gas fields of their wealth to get the energy to do that…. We can’t afford to let our food system just ‘run out’ some day.
Robert Rodale

If something is said about nature, then it is already no longer nature.
Ch’eng Hao

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
Loren Eiseley

Destroying rain forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
Edward O Wilson

Life would be so much easier if we weren’t always struggling to clean up our grandparents’ messes!
Brian Toka

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

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
Neil Armstrong

A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place.
George Washington Carver

Hopefully the trips we will be making in the next couple of decades will open up our eyes a little. When you are looking at the Earth from the lunar distance, its atmosphere is just unobservable. The atmosphere is so thin, and such a minute part of the Earth, that it can’t be sensed at all. That should impress everyone. The atmosphere of the Earth is a small and valuable resource. We’ve going to have to learn how to conserve it and use it wisely. Down here in the crowd you are aware of the atmosphere and it seems adequate, so you don’t worry about it too much. But from a different vantage point, perhaps it is possible to understand more easily why we should be worrying.
Neil Armstrong



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