Rachel Carson

"In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth."

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

"If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truly about the sea and leave out the poetry."

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land."

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."

"The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — the soil, the water, the forests, the minerals, and wildlife."

"Anything that evolves must take chances."

"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility."

"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, water, and wildlife with dangerous and even lethal materials."

"We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What of man's relation to the rest of nature?"

"A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement."

"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from conception until death."

"There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature."

"We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair."

"The scope of the new age of atomic energy extends far beyond the needs of war."

"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should be chosen as the repository of our ultimate industrial wastes."

"I am always touched by the way people instinctively reach toward nature when they are troubled."

"The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him."

"As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life."

"For all our sophistication and progress, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."

"The truth is, the sea is so immense, so beautiful, so wonderfully indifferent to us, that it would be petty to desire possession of any part of it."

"It is a nature of human soul to fear the darkness and to find comfort in light."

"The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature and other species, but over ourselves."

"Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insecure surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our friends?"

"There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it."

"We are dealing now with a population of humans who will lose their capacity to understand what they have lost, because they are growing up in a degraded world."

"Living things are not mere parts of a machine. They are living entities bound together by the invisible threads of nature."

"In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future, and bonds to one another."

"The most important aspect of the environmental crisis is that organisms and humans are interconnected."

"Whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have suffered a loss."