Noam Chomsky Quotes

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

For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death.

I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.

Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness.

Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world's poor people depend.

We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

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

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

Anybody who doesn't see the impact of climate change is really, I would say, myopic. They don't see the reality. It's so evident that we are destroying Mother Earth. This is not the problem of one country or a few countries: it is the problem of mankind. We need to work together to stop this. Otherwise, our future generations will simply disappear.

In a broader sense, the irony in all of this is the single most necessary element for life to exist, in fact, is killing everything, from our ecosystems to potentially our food supply if we're poisoning fish and the foods that we eat. That is the broader sense.

Make the wrong choices now and future generations will live with a changed climate, depleted resources and without the green space and biodiversity that contribute both to our standard of living and our quality of life

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.

Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.

Obviously, my perception of the world is one where humans are a threat to our survival.

I have witnessed the takeover of my world by plastic.

Man marks the earth with ruin - his control stops with the shore.

There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.

It wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it.

Whether many people realize it yet or not, man, the Inferior Animal, has by now proved himself incapable of keeping his own species - and others - alive for very much longer. So the earth has begun its own plan to set things right.

The Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.

We the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency-a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential...the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising...Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on earth itself.

We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.