Patrick Ness Quotes

The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.

The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'

Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. If you keep your eyes open as you travel around, you realize we are destroying this planet.

Today, the tide has turned, we are destroying them.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

We're the only species that have crapped up the planet and the only species that can clean it up.

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

This planet is our home and we're trashing and killing it.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

The whites, too, shall pass - perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

The civilized people of today look back with horror at their medieval ancestors who wantonly destroyed great works of art or sat slothfully by while they destroyed. We have passed this stage.... Here in the U.S. we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy our forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals - not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at best it looks as if our people were awakening.

what man calls civilizationalways results in desertsman is never on the squarehe uses up the fat and greenery of the eartheach generation wastes a little moreof the future with greed and lust for riches

We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

Slowly the wasters and despoilers are impoverishing our land, our nature, and our beauty, so that there will not be one beach, one hill, one lane, one meadow, one forest free from the debris of man and the stigma of his improvidence.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

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

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.

Capitalism is destroying the earth.

If environmental protection efforts continue to lag behind economic growth, pollution will become even more rampant.

[Industrialism's soon diminishing] capacity to supply human needs could be prevented if men exercised any restraint or foresight in their present frenzied exploitation.

By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors.

You know the old expression "We haven't inherited the world from our parents, we've borrowed it from our children"? Well it's just not true. We haven't borrowed anything.

To the Green movement in which infantilism is seen at its worst, authority is a far more serious evil than the destruction of life.

Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide - all can be traced easily to too many people.