Rachel Carson

Knowledge, understanding, and wisdom come slowly, down a long road.

The war against the land has now become a war against ourselves.

There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

The beauty of the natural world lies in the details.

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

Exploring nature is a journey of discovery.

The fate of all life on earth depends on the human race.

The moon, like a flower in heaven's high bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

The earth does not belong to us: we belong to the earth.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.

The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.

To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to some overwhelming desire for advantage, to have faltered so often in our efforts to protect and preserve life and the land, suggests that we are, simply, very bad pupils.

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.

We stand now at a crossroads in the history of life.

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

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to find spiritual refreshment.

The sea lies all about us. The commerce of all the world is carried on its surface. Its living creatures feed mankind. The ocean is a mighty reservoir of life.

We are surrounded by an infinite variety of forms of life, many of them beautiful, many of them strange, all of them interesting.