DDT Quotes

As one of its first acts after coming into existence, the EPA banned the vital pesticide DDT.

One day at Princeton, I noticed there were dead birds on the pavement between the campus buildings, where very large trees were. It turns out it was DDT. At the time, in the early '50s, no one thought DDT was dangerous to anybody but insects. I went down to the Daily Princetonian, the college paper, and tried to persuade them to do a story. They said, "Naw, there's nothing wrong." But that taught me a very important lesson. One, that newspaper people can get very jaded. Second, that you might know something, like an expert chemistry professor, you are not going to apply what you know.

You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.

They banned DDT, not because it was necessarily bad, but because it was a great way to help the population control.

Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay. It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned-in both cases causing pollution. In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated.

If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia - not to mention other poor countries in Africa - there's one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives. It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.

Jake 'The Snake' Roberts of Stone Mountain, Georgia, was the darkest! I mean, he could've been a movie villain, he was so intense! He also had the hardest finishing move of all time, the DDT.

Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees, please.

They banned DDT, not because it was necessarily bad, but because it was a great way to help population control. Banning DDT permits more human deaths from insect-born diseases, like malaria.