Sidney Poitier Quotes

There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

For him nature is basically a golf course or a ranch--or a national park turned into a country club where folks can burn off stress by speeding over the snow while polluting the air of Yellowstone with gas-guzzling skidoos.

As well expect Nature to answer your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

The tragic side of many architectural enterprises is that they destroy natural beauties which are a priceless possession and cannot be replaced.

Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming.

If it's unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature

The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.

Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college.

Forests are the world's air-conditioning system-the lungs of the planet-and we are on the verge of switching it off.

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

The earth, that is nature's mother, is her tomb.

I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist. I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.

We need a much deeper understanding of exactly what it is our industrial society, in its present creation, is jeopardizing. We need a more profound perception of what is at stake.

Taking care of our planet is like taking care of our houses. Since we human beings come from Nature, there is no point in our going against nature, which is why I say the environment is not a matter of religion or ethics or morality. These are luxuries, since we can survive without them. But we will not survive if we continue to go against nature.

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.

We think there is an ecological problem, but the real problem is irresponsible growth of human population.

Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands. Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, microorganisms, and many of the insects.

The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence.

Our numbers expand, but Earth's natural systems do not.