Pope Francis Quotes

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.

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

I don't know if human activity is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face, we have in a sense taken over nature.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion has broken Nature's social union.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity's trying to accomplish something.

People thought they could explain and conquer nature-yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

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.

We have, in a sense, lorded it over nature, over Sister Earth, over Mother Earth, i think man has gone too far.

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.

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

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites.

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

On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.

Fracking kills, and it doesn't just kill us. It kills the land, nature and, eventually, the whole world.

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

Apart from the most obvious cases, like the Oriental Bittersweet vine, escaped from private gardens and smothering the mountains one acre at a time, the most painful proof of man's destruction is not what you can see right in front of you; it's what you will never see again.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

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.

Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are ... bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations s secure, if not the absolute permanence and equilibrium of both ... at least a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change There was a strange stillness The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.