Adolph Gottlieb Quotes

I believe that even 'returning-to-nature' and anti pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the over development of the present age.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

Arbor Day is not like other holidays. Each of those reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear.

If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.

The Left is correctly wary of talk about nonhumans in the key of Nature and its spiritual partner, humanity.

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

Nothing is more conservative than conservation

My principles are simple. Protect the Earth. Serve the People, and Explore the Universe

There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess.

Our aims in political activism are not, and should not be, to create a perfect utopia. What we seek is more simply to improve the quality of human life while at the same time respecting the natural environment which sustains it: 'Not a heaven on earth but a better earth on earth.' This is not at all a timid agenda, far from it. The work ahead of us is enormous!

We are not talking about esthetics. We are talking about life: survival of Man. We must train young people to get another vision of Nature. We call it 'wilderness,' and we think it is progress to get further and further away from it. How crazy! Where would we have been if Nature had not built us up?

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

My mission is to create a world where we can live in harmony with nature. And can I do that alone? No. So there is a whole army of youth that can do it. So I suppose my mission is to reach as many of those young people as I can through my own efforts.

To this day, I enjoy nature, the luxury of undisturbed wilderness, forests, mountains, lakes, rivers and deserts and their wildlife. But I also know that the greatest danger to their perpetuity is the pressure of human population.

Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

Environmentalists and clean energy champions should stop telling people that we are working for "sustainability," which nobody understands.

Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.

Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world

As for myself, I do not believe in loggers, I believe in trees. I do not believe in fishermen, I believe in fish. I do not believe in miners, I believe in the rocks beneath my feet. I do not believe in pie in the sky spirituality, I believe in rainbows, rivers, mountains, and moss. I do not believe in environmentalists, I believe in the environment. I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her, those parasites who believe the Earth is here to serve human interests.