Rachel Carson famous quotes

The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world-the very nature of its life.
-- Rachel Carson

#Men #Air #Sea

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

#Home #Circles #Insanity

The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.
-- Rachel Carson

#Sea #Sky #Amazing Life

A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods.
-- Rachel Carson

#Rain #Perfect #Woods

It is not half so important to know as to feel.
-- Rachel Carson

#Important #Half #Feels

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
-- Rachel Carson

#Strength #Beauty #Nature

Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.
-- Rachel Carson

#Ocean #Men #Whales

There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.
-- Rachel Carson

#Ocean #Water #Tides

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.
-- Rachel Carson

#Nature #Future #Character

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.
-- Rachel Carson

#Running #Moving #Years

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
-- Rachel Carson

#Inspirational #Time #Nature

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
-- Rachel Carson

#Nature #Zoos #Ocean

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.
-- Rachel Carson

#Beauty #Nature #Humility

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.
-- Rachel Carson

#Discipline #Listening #Stills

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future.
-- Rachel Carson

#Past #Earth #Environment

As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.
-- Rachel Carson

#Men #Fabric #Clubs

Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.
-- Rachel Carson

#Believe #Thinking #Maturity

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
-- Rachel Carson

#War #Men

The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
-- Rachel Carson

#War #Civilization #Losing

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
-- Rachel Carson

#Nature #Children #Years

The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.
-- Rachel Carson

#Beautiful #Sea #Strange

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew i would never see it again?
-- Rachel Carson

#Motivational #Change #Gratitude

Why would anyone believe it is possible to lay down such barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.
-- Rachel Carson

#Believe #Earth #Poison

The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.
-- Rachel Carson

#Men #Air #Sea

The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.
-- Rachel Carson

#Nature #Philosophy #Men

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.
-- Rachel Carson

#Change #Nature #Men

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.
-- Rachel Carson

#World #Firsts #Environment

We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.
-- Rachel Carson

#Risk #Wish #Needs

Those who love and free nature are never alone.
-- Rachel Carson

#Environment

I am always more interested in what I am about to do than what I have already done.
-- Rachel Carson

#Inspirational #Done

Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.
-- Rachel Carson

#Knowing #Would Be #Silent

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one "less traveled by"-offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
-- Rachel Carson

#Lying #Two #Long

It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.
-- Rachel Carson

#Eras #Dollars #Cost

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.
-- Rachel Carson

#Ocean #Sea #Way

A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power.
-- Rachel Carson

#Drinking #Pesticides #Bones

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
-- Rachel Carson

#Humility #Men #Hands

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.
-- Rachel Carson

#Heart #Men #Animal

It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
-- Rachel Carson

#Men #Thinking #Choices

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
-- Rachel Carson

#Beach #Nature #Ocean

I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to 'know' as to 'feel'.
-- Rachel Carson

#Children #Believe #Parent

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.
-- Rachel Carson

Short version: For the child. . ., it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. . . . It is more important to pave the way for a child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts that he is not ready to assimilate.
-- Rachel Carson

#Children #Garden #Important

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
-- Rachel Carson

#Beautiful #Children #Garden

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.
-- Rachel Carson

#Song #Morning #Spring

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.
-- Rachel Carson

#Inspirational #Peace #Nature

For all at last return to the sea- to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.
-- Rachel Carson

#Nature #Ocean #Sea

In nature nothing exists alone.
-- Rachel Carson

#Environment

To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view.
-- Rachel Carson

#Garden #Views #Years

This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.
-- Rachel Carson

#Eras #Problem #Fit

The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind - that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. . . . Now I can believe I have at least helped a little.
-- Rachel Carson

#Believe #Mind #Trying

Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life.
-- Rachel Carson

#Men #Focus #Shapes

But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.
-- Rachel Carson

#Remember #Invisible #Force

The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
-- Rachel Carson

#Giving #Endure #Obligation

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.
-- Rachel Carson

#Past #Reality #Numbers

The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.
-- Rachel Carson

#Real #Lying #Water

We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow.
-- Rachel Carson

#Men #Thinking #Years

We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.
-- Rachel Carson

#Men #Rivers #Important

Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
-- Rachel Carson

#Humility #Lust #Sides

It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh... Even the streams were now lifeless... No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves...
-- Rachel Carson

#Morning #Spring #Voice

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
-- Rachel Carson

#Literature #Biographies #Fiction

Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience.
-- Rachel Carson

#Reality

Nothing is wasted in the sea; every particle of material is used over and over again, first by one creature, then by another. And when in spring the waters are deeply stirred, the warm bottom water brings to the surface a rich supply of minerals, ready for use by new forms of life.
-- Rachel Carson

#Spring #Sea #Water

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?
-- Rachel Carson

#Vision #Demand #Accepting