Daniel Berrigan Quotes

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

We all see that, today, man can destroy the foundation of his existence: his Earth.

For years I have engaged with this ecological crisis on an intellectual level, the mounting evidence, the science... but now I have engaged with the potential destruction of this world on an emotional level and there is a fundamental difference. There is huge feeling of grief, of loss.

It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness.

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

Cabbies in particular seem to like discussing the fate the Earth.

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

I hereby accuse the North American empire of being the biggest menace to our planet.

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

Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn't work.

Environmentalism has failed.

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.

I can't even consider the prospect of grandchildren because I don't know if there will be anything left for them on Earth. That's how serious the problem is. We can't drink the water or breathe the air, and we're all dying from some sort of cancer. How many generations can sustain that? It frightens me terribly.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

I always get involved with the environment because once you go past the tipping point with the environment, you don't get it back.

If you look at the state of our planet, the next generations won't be around if we consider sustainability as a gimmick.

I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts.

We do not yet have the solutions to these questions, but the awareness that we live in an endangered world is present in more and more life situations.

There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.

The language 'It's too late' is very unsuitable for most environmental issues. It's too late for the dodo and for people who've starved to death already, but it's not too late to prevent an even bigger crisis. The sooner we act on the environment, the better.

We're in a war, the war of industrial civilization against the natural world.