Top 100 Environmentalism's Quotes
#1. It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.
George Will
#2. Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it?
Andy Couturier
#3. We can all avoid travel that is unnecessary; we do not need to travel around the world when the source of all joy and all beauty is right within us.
Eknath Easwaran
#4. A good zoo," Stella said, "is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don't hurt." She pauses, considering her words. "A good zoo is how humans make amends.
Katherine Applegate
#5. That's the key to walking through the Wall.... You have to first see it as not being a Wall, even though everyone you know still sees it as a Wall.
Kevin J. Shay
#6. Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.
Zeena Schreck
#7. Mankind is busily manufacturing its way into extinction.
Steven Magee
#8. Environmentalism isn't a discipline or specialty. It's a way of seeing our place in the world. And we need everybody to see the world that way. Don't think 'In order to make a difference I have to become an environmentalist.'
David Suzuki
#9. Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.
Diane Ackerman
#10. Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot.
Sherman Alexie
#12. Let us get of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still.
Richard Jefferies
#13. So many people think you have to be rich and famous to really create an impact, and it's just not true. Especially when it comes to environmentalism.
Eva Longoria
#14. Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.
Christopher Lasch
#15. Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history.
Callum Roberts
#17. Environmentalism is a form of pagan fundamentalism. These green wackos are fanatics like al-Quaida. Just like them.
G. Gordon Liddy
#18. The wellspring for the passion that drove public speech and action in behalf of the environment was in large part religious and ethical. Environmentalism, in short, had become one version of nature religion in the lingering shadow of American transcendentalism.
Catherine L. Albanese
#19. Well, sir. I look at facts. And the fact is that our world is dying and if we don't all do our best to save it, we aren't going to last much longer.
A.J. Lauer
#20. Forests should not be walked on, they should be walked under and through.
Courtney M. Privett
#21. We risk losing what nature is if we couch its value in human terms.
Richard Black
#22. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
David Brin
#24. Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics.
A.E. Samaan
#25. What are we individually doing to join effects to combat climate change?
Lailah Gifty Akita
#26. What's wrong with being naked?
Zeena Schreck on AMLA to Christian Minister Jerry Johnston
Zeena Schreck
#27. The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.
Carl Sagan
#28. we have forgotten how to press our fingers
to the tilting planet's jugular and measure
her pulse. we have forgotten symbiosis,
that she is our mother.
we have forgotten that when we rape
our world we rape ourselves.
Beth Morey
#29. To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
Barbara Kingsolver
#30. We'll tell him his mother waits for him in heaven, I suppose."
"Is that a lie?"
"It's what we tell fools and children." She sighed. "Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth.
Sheri S. Tepper
#31. 'Noah' doesn't merely get the story wrong; like all Biblical adaptations, it's bound to do that (although some aspects of the film are out and out ridiculous). It gets the morality of the story wrong, and in the process turns God into Gaia and morality into radical deep green environmentalism.
Ben Shapiro
#32. Your power stations, your cars, your creature comforts. Well, you lived too long. The bill's due. Today.
David Mitchell
#33. At least Ozymandias had a statue erected in his name. If I were to have died at that moment, the only thing I had managed to erect in my honor was a shrine to China's manufacturing capabilities.
Michael Gurnow
#34. The Guardian's headline is 'How Going Green May Make You Mean.' We're inclined to think the chain of causation runs the other way - that people who are jerks to begin with gravitate toward verdant sanctimony.
James Taranto
#35. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing - while denying - that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.
David Mitchell
#36. Apocalyptic thinking happens on the left as well as on the right, and in environmentalism, that's a terrible approach to take. Because it isn't true.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#37. If we were all minimalists instead of conspicuous consumers, there would be less demand on the world's resources and we'd have a smaller, less berserk economy. We'd be less likely to harm the only planet we'll ever have, and the super-rich would have fewer ways to exploit us.
Robert Wringham
#38. If owning frivolous articles of excess were indeed the trappings of malevolence, my home was ready to play host to the Axis powers.
Michael Gurnow
#39. We cannot fulfill that purpose [environmentalism] if we are heaping contempt on God's creation.
Joe Lieberman
#40. I am here because I have to be here, as here I am supposed to be! All things should be, and usually are, found in their rightful places. Can you imagine how chaotic the world would be if nothing was in its correct place?
William O'Brien
#41. They keep saying that sea levels are rising an' all this. It's nowt to do with the icebergs melting, it's because there's too many fish in it. Get rid of some of the fish and the water will drop. Simple. Basic science.
Karl Pilkington
#42. I'd somehow managed to get an executive stuck in a tree. Instead of a saucer of milk and 'Here kitty, kitty, kitty,' someone might want to bring a hedge fund and a recording of George Bush promising 'No new taxes.
Michael Gurnow
#43. It's really important to me to show the interconnectedness of things. I always try to illustrate how environmentalism, humanitarianism, animal rights - all those things - are one and the same.
Daryl Hannah
#44. I want to show people that environmentalism can be fun!
Adrian Grenier
#45. If human beings were to treat one another's personal property the way they treat the natural environment, we would view that behavior as anti-social and illegal.
Bartholomew I Of Constantinople
#47. Okay, little car, you are protesting roads. They are death traps for animals. They are environmentally unsound impervious surfaces that cause runoff. I understand this. But could we protest in the summer?
Carrie Jones
#48. Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.
Edward O. Wilson
#49. As for environmentalism, I'm only an environmentalist by accident. I live in New York, so I bike, and the closest grocery store to me sells organic produce. I also shop with a book bag because I ride a bike, and it's hard to carry the paper or plastic bags.
Jesse Eisenberg
#50. Dan explains the trip's itinerary, which includes trekking through the jungle, boating down the Amazon River, and to my surprise, three Ayahuasca ceremonies.
Michael Sanders
#51. The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
Jean Rostand
#52. I thought I should make a place to bring light down into this world. All things that become realities start in that place of someone imagining them.
Andy Couturier
#53. I had not been prepared for my employer's approach to vehicular navigation, which was a simple case of being unable to tell the difference between a very large, multi-windowed van that could accommodate a mobile disco and a Formula One racer.
Michael Gurnow
#54. Man steps on an ant when he can't catch the fly.
Bill Gaede
#55. I think all people want freedom, but they've got this idea inserted into their head about money.
Andy Couturier
#56. Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.
Andy Couturier
#57. She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.
Peter Heller
#58. My wife simply quoted, 'For better or worse.' It was only then that I realized the phrase was not multiple-choice.
Michael Gurnow
#59. We depend on this planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our life support system running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is more important than finding a way to live together - justly, respectfully, sustainably, joyfully - on the only planet we can call home.
Annie Leonard
#60. I've tried to approach environmentalism the same way I do my climbing: by setting small, concrete goals that build on each other.
Alex Honnold
#61. Everything we personally own that's made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we're either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.
Yvon Chouinard
#62. There's only three things you need to do when you are finished editing your book - Sleep! Sleep! and Sleep!
A. Louise Robertson
#63. As soon as the first piece of foliage came within blade's reach, my student started frantically swinging the machete like he was defending his virtue from a trove of drunken, handsy woodland elves. 'I feel like I'm in the movie Predator,' he said as he decapitated a flower.
Michael Gurnow
#64. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own-indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all it's diversity, beauty, and wonder.
Jeanette Winter
#65. The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.
Al Gore
#67. I feel part of the environment, not separate from it, as though I'm at home rather than visiting - as though I'm tapped into some eternal omnipresence beyond the transient physical forms.
Michael Sanders
#68. Humanity has overcome the food chain, and having surpassed all other predators, has now turned to a strange form of cannibalism: humanity preys upon itself. We cull our own herd. We murder our own children. This is what we call "progress".
A.E. Samaan
#70. No. This makes me sad." He pointed at all the garbage on the ground. "And the sky. You
can't even see the stars. They've polluted the sky. This is a terrible time to be a satyr.
Rick Riordan
#71. There's terrible evil in the world."
It comes from men," said Holly. "All other elil do what they have to do and Frith moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.
Richard Adams
#72. I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.
Gale Norton
#73. There is a reason why trash bags aren't made of transparent plastic.
Colin Beavan
#74. Often I'll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there's no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the energy of the mountains and of the trees.
Andy Couturier
#75. No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened
David Attenborough
#76. Darwinists are right to say that selection favours the organisms that leave alive the most progeny, but vigorous growth takes place within a constrained space where feedback from the environment allows the emergence of natural self-regulation.
James E. Lovelock
#77. My understanding of environmentalism, of the things that radicalize people, of the ethics and effectiveness of different kinds of social protest have definitely become more nuanced and more informed, but they aren't much clearer.
Marshall Curry
#78. Moreover God hath ordained man in this world, as it were, the very image of himself, to the intent, that he, as it were a god on earth, should provide for the wealth of all creatures.
Desiderius Erasmus
#79. If we take care of our trees,
our trees will take care of us.
If we take care of our animals,
our animals will take care of us.
If we take care of our land,
our land will take care of us.
If we take care of our world,
our world will take care of us.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#80. Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.
Richard Louv
#81. I once took a poo in the woods while hunched over like an animal. It was AWESOME.
Drew Barrymore
#82. Workable solutions for Earth are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers, or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Lawrence Anthony
#83. A foolish environmentalist wants to save nature from the greed of the market by exposing it to the tragedy of the commons. A smart environmentalist wants to save nature from the tragedy of the commons by exposing it to the greed of the market.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#84. Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations.
Russell Kirk
#85. In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles.
Paul Roberts
#86. The idea that humans are yet intelligent enough to serve as stewards of the Earth is among the most hubristic ever.
James E. Lovelock
#87. Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming.
Vaclav Klaus
#88. We need to be rid of the insane policy of environmentalism. No more 'green', anti-growth, anti-science environmental policy.
Kesha Rogers
#89. Humanity's current demand for energy is fundamentally unsustainable. The only feasible choice is to conduct a massive downscaling of all economic, industrial, and political operations. A decentralized, autonomous, and locally-based energy infrastructure is ultimately the only sustainable option.
Stacy Pettigrew
#91. Environmentalism is a dangerous ideology endangering human freedom.
Vaclav Klaus
#92. The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.
Wangari Maathai
#93. Few things in this world evoke scrotum-shriveling fear in a man like a group of frowning women, enraged to the point of atypical silence, ambling toward him with an obvious agenda.
Michael Gurnow
#94. Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.
Michael Crichton
#95. The assumptions that "pollution is the price of progress" or that "we must choose between jobs and the environment" have long limited our creative thinking about innovative solutions that can be good for the environment, the workers, and a healthy economy.
Annie Leonard
#96. My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it.
Andy Couturier
#97. ... most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.
Yvon Chouinard
#98. Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible
it's to dismantle those systems.
Lierre Keith
#99. You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.
Bill Maher
#100. I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively, instead of skeptically and dictatorially.
E.B. White
