Top 100 Rachel Carson Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.
Rachel Carson
#3. Unless we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is-whether its victim is human or animal-we cannot expect things to be much better in the world.
Rachel Carson
#4. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.
Rachel Carson
#5. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
Rachel Carson
#6. It is not half so important to know as to feel.
Rachel Carson
#7. 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
#8. We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.
Rachel Carson
#9. 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
#11. In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.
Rachel Carson
#12. To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.
Rachel Carson
#13. Darling
I suppose the world would consider us absolutely crazy, but it is wonderful to feel that way, isn't it? Sort of a perpetual springtime in our hearts.
Rachel Carson
#14. Only as a child's awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.
Rachel Carson
#15. There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life - we are never bored.
Rachel Carson
#16. Nowhere on the shore is the relation of a creature to its surroundings a matter of a single cause and effect; each living thing is bound to its world by many threads, weaving the intricate design of the fabric of life.
Rachel Carson
#17. 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
#18. The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water.
Rachel Carson
#19. The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.
Rachel Carson
#20. 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
#21. And so in my mind's eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality - earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.
Rachel Carson
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Carson's thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution.
Rachel Carson
#25. Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.
Rachel Carson
#26. By suggestion and example, I believe children can be helped to hear the many voices about them. Take Time to listen and talk about the voices of the earth and what they mean-the majestic voice of thunder, the winds, the sound of surf or flowing streams.
Rachel Carson
#27. For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future ... Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time ...
Rachel Carson
#28. The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.
Rachel Carson
#29. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.
Rachel Carson
#30. 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
#31. Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.
Rachel Carson
#32. 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
#33. Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.
Rachel Carson
#34. 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
#35. Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.
Rachel Carson
#36. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?
Rachel Carson
#37. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons
Rachel Carson
#38. The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history ... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
Rachel Carson
#39. The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became. I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.
Rachel Carson
#40. A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods.
Rachel Carson
#41. For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.
Rachel Carson
#42. When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself - the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflit and eternal change.
Rachel Carson
#43. We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?
Rachel Carson
#44. I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.
Rachel Carson
#45. Drink in the beauty and wonder at the meaning of what you see.
Rachel Carson
#46. Every grain of sand or silt carried out by the rivers and deposited at sea displaces a corresponding amount of water.
Rachel Carson
#47. I still feel there is a case to be made for my old belief that as man approaches the 'new heaven and the new earth'
or the space-age universe, if you will, he must do so with humility rather than with arrogance.
Rachel Carson
#48. One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space.
Rachel Carson
#49. 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.
Rachel Carson
#50. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.
Rachel Carson
#51. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.
Rachel Carson
#52. In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
Rachel Carson
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.
Rachel Carson
#56. 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
#57. [Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me that usually means many, many revisions.
Rachel Carson
#58. 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
#59. Nature reserves some of her choice rewards for days when her mood may appear to be somber.
Rachel Carson
#60. Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power.
Rachel Carson
#61. Natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society.
Rachel Carson
#62. What sets the new synthetic insecticides is their enormous biological potency.
Rachel Carson
#63. To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.
Rachel Carson
#64. 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
#65. When the public protests. confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizers pills of half truth.
Rachel Carson
#66. Then the song of a whitethroat, pure and ethereal, with the dreamy quality of remembered joy.
Rachel Carson
#67. 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
#68. The responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress.
Rachel Carson
#70. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience.
Rachel Carson
#71. By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?
Rachel Carson
#72. I am always more interested in what I am about to do than what I have already done.
Rachel Carson
#73. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
Rachel Carson
#74. 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
#75. Those who love and free nature are never alone.
Rachel Carson
#76. 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
#77. Carson's writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness. It
Rachel Carson
#78. 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
#79. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.
Rachel Carson
#80. Many children ... delight in the small and inconspicuous.
Rachel Carson
#81. In the fish world many things are told by sound waves.
Rachel Carson
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal-each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water.
Rachel Carson
#85. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.
Rachel Carson
#87. From a ball of mud taken from a birds plumage, Charles Darwin raised 82 separate plants, belonging to five distinct species!
Rachel Carson
#88. 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
#89. Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we will say our work is finished.
Rachel Carson
#90. 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
#91. Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.
Rachel Carson
#92. If I had influence with the good fairy ... 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.
Rachel Carson
#93. 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.
Rachel Carson
#94. 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.
Rachel Carson
#95. 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
#96. Our attitude towards plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith.
Rachel Carson
#97. When any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end as natural. When that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.
Rachel Carson
#98. On the other hand, those who are willing to wait for an extra season other two for full results (against an Japanese beetle) will turn to milky disease; they will be rewarded with lasting control that become more, rather than less effective with the passage of time.
Rachel Carson
#99. Autumn comes to the sea with a fresh blaze of phosphorescence, when every wave crest is aflame. Here and there the whole surface may glow with sheets of cold fire, while below schools of fish pour through the water like molten metal.
Rachel Carson
#100. ....The chemists' ingenuity in devising insecticides has long ago outrun biological knowledge of the way these poisons affect the living organism.
Rachel Carson
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