Peter Cook Quotes

It could be so beautiful here if the Americans themselves had not made it so ugly with their big buildings, their millions of cars, and noise.

Everywhere I go I see increasing evidence of people swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making.

The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads... It includes... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song.

I don't think the planet can survive people. It's not the other way around. I don't think the planet can survive.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.

The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.

You can collect all the plastic bottle caps you want as long as you give me the money so we can get off this death trap, find somewhere else and have tremendous fun screwing that up as well.

The relentless invisible storm of radio signals and electronic particles, the hustle and bustle, and the billions of petrol explosions in the engine blocks of trucks and cars seem to churn up the molecules of life and heaven so violently that the beautiful fogs are unable to hold together like they once did.

Most descriptions make Beijing sound overbuilt: not a blade of grass left.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.

I hate, hate Times Square!

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

20 centuries of progress have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account and a high opinion of himself but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment.

Bangkok is a toilet without a flush.

New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.

I saw with open eyes, Singing birds sweet, Sold in the shops, For the people to eat, Sold in the shops of, Stupidity Street.

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.

Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

I think it was a realization of this cancer, an understanding of the broader implications of what cancer is. The greed, the ravaging of lands and seas for profit, the taking of things that don't belong to us; what we've done to the environment in this fast-paced, careless hunger. I think all of that was happening in my body.

The whole Ireland was taken over by greed and materialism. It was extraordinary. The price of every house had skyrocketed. If you were a small farmer and you had two fields outside, if you built 17 bungalows on them all, you become a millionaire, that kind of thing. It was extraordinary to see how rapidly that kind of ethic takes over a whole culture, but that's what's happened to us since the year 1998, about. It's completely extraordinary how little regard the culture had for the landscape. The country is now full of these half-built industrial parks and hotels.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.