Carl Sagan Quotes

I think that the environment is very a complicated question. I am very sympathetic to people who support the environment who live in the United States. I am very sympathetic to people who don't support the environment who live in a very poor country.

We don't have seasons anymore. You know why? We lost the ozone layer. Well, put it on milk cartons - let's find it!

Kids are an important audience to reach for the future of the planet.

A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.

We save paradise by an intense education program where you get people that you can trust to talk sanely about the environment and hope that the message will get through.

There is no point trying to figure out who is guilty or not at un-balancing the planet. I think we need to figure out and solve the problems together and not isolate from each other.

I wanted to help raise awareness, so I created an environmental foundation called Just Within Reach.

I began working with the John Muir Institute and then started helping found Friends of the Earth organizations here and there in other countries. That pretty well brings us up to the present.

Sometimes the media gives us the impression that we are terminal patients, because of problems of global warmth or the ozone layer. And the people, they don't understand that they can could change this situation for the better if they could act locally in a city.

If you want to go beyond that small percentage of people who are already environmentally and scientifically aware, you have to make your work somehow link with a passion, interest, or profession of someone who isn't interested in science or nature.

You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for.

Every once in a while, I get mad. 'The Lorax' came out of my being angry. The ecology books I'd read were dull... In 'The Lorax,' I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

It's absolutely stupid that we live without an ozone layer. We have men, we've got rockets, we've got saran wrap - fix it!

If children have an interest in nature, they will understand. I want them to become people who appreciate the consequences the next generation will suffer if we destroy our natural surroundings. So without a doubt, they need to learn that nature is vital to us by experiencing it. I want them to like nature and to climb mountains and so on.

We must give everyone a stake in the World’s environment.

Since the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” humans have done extraordinary things. We stabilized the stratospheric ozone layer; we connected people in instantaneous and previously unimaginable ways; we landed a golf cart on Mars and drove it around. We even got every nation-state on earth (except ours, apparently) to agree to try to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by midcentury.

That's the big mistake the environmental movement made - 'We'll scare the hell out of you, and you'll become an activist'.

We have rocked the ozone radically, man. They could probably fix the ozone if everybody stopped what they were doing and they put some cement up there.

Securing a sustainable future will take all of us working together.

I get these students who come in and say, I want to help people. I say, people get plenty of help. Why don't you help the planet?

Who can stop climate change? We can. You and you and you, and me. And it is not just that we can stop it, we have a responsibility to do so that began in the genesis of humanity, when God commanded the earliest human inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, "to till it and keep it". To "keep" it; not to abuse it, not to make as much money as possible from it, not to destroy it.

Of all the unpopular things that Donald Trump is doing, the polling shows that the one that's most out of whack with Americans' opinions are these attacks on the environment. And it means, too, that people are going to have to start stepping up a little bit in other places.

We woke up some years ago about the consequences of ozone depletion, the hole in the atmosphere. You can't see it. You can't taste it. You can't smell it. But now we do regard that as a key issue. It's a scientific finding.

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.