Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed

The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance.

Earth is a flower and it's pollinating.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

For greed, all nature is too little.

Who sows a field, or trains a flower, Or plants at tree, is more than all.

Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.

We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

I am in love with the green earth.

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may "conquer" them.

Flowers often grow more beautifully on dung-hills than in gardens that look beautifully kept.

The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed.

As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.

It's our greed to extract more and more from good that turns it into evil.

Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.

The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

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.

Where flowers degenerate man cannot live.

Gardening is a humbling experience.

There are so many messages and lessons that I have been taught that I would want to share with people. Perhaps one that is very present in my mind now is the concept that we are all living on this one tiny planet that we call Earth. It is very small and is not getting any bigger, but the amount of people living on this planet continues to grow at a rapid rate.

But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.