Rachel Carson

There was a time when man had a closer communion with the natural world, but now we have become so separated. We have lost our sense of wonder.

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.

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.

I like to define ecology as ‘the web of life’ or ‘the interconnectedness of all things.’

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

Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

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 road—the one less traveled by—offers our only chance to arrive at a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.

Drinkers of water, who are we? We are the people who will drink this water.

I am not a scientist in a white coat. I am a writer who happens to write about science.

The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.

We are not to be a generation that leaves behind nothing but a devastated planet.

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life—a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously informed with power of recuperation and survival.

The ocean is a vast and mysterious realm, full of wonders yet to be discovered.

Perhaps the most serious of all the omissions of the mass extermination programs is the failure to take into account the fact that environmental pollution is a two-way street.

There is a profound and mysterious relationship between man and the sea.

It is not my intention to lead you into a life of morbid contemplation of the future. I want rather to awaken in you a sense of urgency.

The more we learn about the complexities of life, the more we realize how little we know.

The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?'

There is no doubt that man has a right to control nature, but only in the sense that he controls himself.