Rachel Carson

The problem of pesticides is not just a problem of killing insects. It is a problem of killing life.

The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to think beyond themselves, to exercise a 'civic virtue' that for generations has been a hallmark of American character.

For all at last return to the sea — to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one 'less traveled by' — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities.

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

We in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth.

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years... is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that you use it so little.

We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die... We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song... These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the 'good' and the 'bad,' to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams.

The sea lies all about us. The commerce of all lands must cross it. The very winds that move over the lands have been cradled on its broad expanse and seek ever to return to it. The continents themselves dissolve and pass to the sea, in grain after grain of eroded land.

I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society.

The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water.

We have already gone very far in our abuse of this planet.