Ogden Nash Quotes

Everybody's seen a stream or a wood they knew replaced by a strip mall.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.

New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.

Trees face many difficulties, what with deforestation and pollution, but that didn't stop me from wanting to be one - to just stop feeling and live.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

I think there are changes in the environment. There are a lot of items to contribute to it.

The destruction of the natural beauty, the ecosystems, and the majesty of mountains affect us in ways we're not even aware of. Every time a mountain is beheaded, we chop off a little part of our souls.

Overcrowded cities are spawning increasingly lawless suburbs. Waste is accumulating in and around them, straining the capacity to deal with it.

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.

It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did.

The more we exploit nature, The more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it's a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

We feel we have to put concrete on every inch of land. It disturbs the ecology, and it takes away the experience of a child going out into the woods and seeing all of nature.

I watch people throw aluminum cans in the trash, and I think of all the stories I've heard about the over-mining of aluminum, the erosion that happens, and the trees that fall down.

For him nature is basically a golf course or a ranch--or a national park turned into a country club where folks can burn off stress by speeding over the snow while polluting the air of Yellowstone with gas-guzzling skidoos.

There probably were floods when our land was newly settled but before we cut our trees so recklessly they were not so serious. If we go to the headwaters of our rivers and we will find the cause and the results which follow in the wake of man's destructive ignorance.

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, / For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. / America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, / And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

The alpine environment is very delicate. I've been able to see change in the mountains in the 20 years that I've been climbing full-time. Glaciers have receded. The tree-line is changing. That's very rapid to see nature changing in a 20-year period.

You cannot see the Milky Way in New York City any more ... We risk the loss of our sensual perception. And if you lose those, naturally, you try to compensate by other stimulations, by very loud noises, or by bright lights or drugs.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the thing it looks upon to bless.