Lewis Thomas Quotes

If we destroy the biosphere, then mankind will die. We all waste our time worrying about stupid wars and petty jealousy and greed, and all the time, we're sitting on a time bomb.

It's a war, I think, to save the planet, really, from ourselves.

Ignorance, hatred and greed are killing nature.

The death of the forest is the end of our life.

As we kill nature, we are killing ourselves, and God incarnate as the world as well.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim.

The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine.

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

The sad thing about destroying the environment is that we're going to take the rest of life with us. The bluebirds will be gone, and the elephants will be gone, and the tigers will be gone, and the pandas will be gone.

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

I want to interpret the natural world and our links to it. It's driven by the belief of many world-class scientists that we're in the midst of an extinction crisis... This time it's us that's doing it.

Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one.

The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

We are a plague on the Earth.

Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you don't need to act; if it's not too late, you don't need to act.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

What region of the earth is not full of our calamities?