Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Inspirational quotes from environmental pioneer Rachel Carson on biology, ecology, nature, life, and earth will nurture your love for environment.
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Most Famous Rachel Carson Quotes
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. Rachel Carson, The Sense Of Wonder
Silent Spring inspired the modern environmental movement, which began in earnest a decade later. It is recognized as the environmental text that changed the world.
In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world the very nature of its life. Rachel Carson
She aimed at igniting a democratic activist movement that would not only question the direction of science and technology but would also demand answers and accountability. Rachel Carson was a prophetic voice and her ‘witness for nature’ is even more relevant and needed if our planet is to survive into a 22nd century.
Many children delight in the small and inconspicuous. Rachel Carson
When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world.
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. Rachel Carson
Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.
Nature reserves some of her choice rewards for days when her mood may appear to be somber. Rachel Carson
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
In nature nothing exists alone.
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. Rachel Carson
A Who’s Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones we had better know something about their nature and their power.
We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Rachel Carson
Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?
The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized. Rachel Carson
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.
In nature, nothing exists alone. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history. Rachel Carson
How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them.
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. Rachel Carson
We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.
There is no drop of water in the ocean, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide. Rachel Carson
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 tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways.
As crude a weapon as the cave man club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life. Rachel Carson
We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.
Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent. Rachel Carson
It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.
The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is the way, the how and the why for everything in our experience. Rachel Carson
If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our ‘right to know,’ and if by knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. Rachel Carson
To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.
This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible.
Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?
The entomologist’s dream of the built in insecticide was born when workers in the field of applied entomology realized they could take a hint from nature: they found that wheat growing in soil containing sodium selenate was immune to attack by aphids or spider mites. Rachel Carson
If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished? Rachel Carson
When the public protests. confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizers pills of half truth.
Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. Rachel Carson
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life Rachel Carson
Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us
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. Rachel Carson
The fact that every meal we eat carries its load of chlorinated hydrocarbons is the inevitable consequence of the almost universal spraying or dusting of agricultural crops with these poisons.
The road the one less traveled by offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. Rachel Carson.
It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. Rachel Carson
When one is concerned with the mysterious and wonderful functioning of the human body, cause and effect are seldom simple and easily demonstrated relationships. They may be widely separated both in space and time. To discover the agent of disease and death depends on a patient piecing together of many seemingly distinct and unrelated facts developed through a vast amount of research in widely separated fields.
The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. Rachel Carson
By their very nature chemical controls are self defeating, for they have been devised and applied without taking into account the complex biological systems against which they have been blindly hurled.
The fabric of life on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. Rachel Carson
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.
The choice, after all, is ours to make. Rachel Carson
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.
But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself. Rachel Carson
In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world the very nature of its life.
To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past. Rachel Carson
Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? Rachel Carson
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life. Rachel Carson
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. Rachel Carson
We live in a scientific age, yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priest like in their laboratories. Rachel Carson
A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods. Rachel Carson
Man undoes the built in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds. Rachel Carson
It is not half so important to know as to feel. Rachel Carson
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 truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry. Rachel Carson
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. Rachel Carson
For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it’s a pity we use it so little. Rachel Carson
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. Rachel Carson
It is not half so important to know as to feel. Rachel Carson
The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves. Rachel Carson
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. Rachel Carson
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, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. Rachel Carson
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. Rachel Carson
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Rachel Carson
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. Rachel Carson
Those who love and free nature are never alone. Rachel Carson
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. Rachel Carson
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. Rachel Carson
The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him. Rachel Carson
How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Rachel Carson
I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life past, present, and future. Rachel Carson
These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task, no high minded orientation, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper. Rachel Carson
As crude a weapon as a cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life. Rachel Carson
Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species man acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world. Rachel Carson
There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life we are never bored. Rachel Carson
Now I truly believe that 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. Rachel Carson
