Pollution Quotes

I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

Pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources depend and will depend in the future on the absolute level of total economic activity. This means that is necessary to restrain both the rate of growth of population and, at least in the developed countries, the rate of growth of consumption per head.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.

Rome is the most dreadful cesspit … the great sewer of Tarquin itself would have been incapable of dealing with such a mass of filth.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

No nation has ever aggressively and intensely exploited national resources over such a great area as has the United States.

… human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled... Four million a month - the equivalent of the population of Chicago... We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

China leads the world in energy consumption, carbon emissions, and the release of major air and water pollutants, and the environmental impact is felt both regionally and globally.

I, Maggie, personally cannot tell you that you're going to save the planet. But what I do know is that we can draw a line to an issue that can conserve what we already have and what's left in a way that we can actually breathe the air, drink the water, actually grow things in soil - that matters in a real, practical way.

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.

I want all hellions to quit puffing that hell fume in God's clean air.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches

We're all environmentalists. People feel like, 'Well, if I drive an SUV, I guess I can't be someone who works on global warming issues,' and you can. You can! If you drive an SUV, you're still an environmentalist.

There are too many people, that's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.

Protecting the environment is just as important a priority as the economic imperatives.

The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

Even the cleanest air, at the centre of the South Pacific or somewhere over Antarctica, has two hundred thousand assorted bits and pieces in every lungful. And this count rises to two million or more in the thick of the Serengeti migration, or over a six-lane highway during rush hour in downtown Los Angeles.