Rachel Carson

A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods.

The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience.

To understand the living world, we must listen to its voices.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of insect's wings.

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

We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and in many cases cumulative in their effect. These exposures now begin at or before birth.

The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.

The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence.

The sea has always been a universal sewer.

We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation... How then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?

The life of the shore is an illustration of the delicate balance of nature, in which each creature exists by permission of the conditions that surround it.

A sense of wonder is so easy to lose and so important to keep.

The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen.

The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance.

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.