Rachel Carson Quotes

We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.

We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me."

I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.

People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they're exactly like the old ones.

Being quiet is comfortable. Keeping things the way they've been is comfortable. And all comfort has done is maintain the status quo.

It's uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.

If perfect's what you're searching for, then just stay the same.

Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity...are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.

We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.

The terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.

If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.

When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.

Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.

Nice is OK when it's among other things but never when it stands alone

There are always a lot of people so afraid of rocking the boat that they stop rowing. We can never get ahead that way.

I think a lot of people, they don't love their jobs but they don't hate them enough to quit. So they're like, "Eh."

Today millions of people are living who will never do it again. Millions are being born for the first time - and millions are doing nothing because it's the best offer they've had this week. It is for these people and many others that the Surprise Party is conceived and desecrated, founded upon the principle that everybody is just as good as anybody else, even though they aren't quite so smart.

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all.

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

I'm no different than any other expendable player.

Insanity is coasting through life.

Ordinary citizens are so accepting of what is going on, grumbling when their material interests were affected, but seemingly accepting the spiritual poverty so characteristic of today.