Thor Heyerdahl Quotes

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.

To conquer nature is, in effect, to remove all natural barriers and human norms and to substitute artificial, fabricated equivalents for natural processes.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

You see, nature will do exactly what it must, and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a way, we will go.

The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

As we kill nature, we are killing ourselves, and God incarnate as the world as well.

Seems you can't outsmart Mother Nature.

We are dependent not so much on Earth, the third planet orbiting the sun, as on Gaea, the integrated system that includes, sustains and is shaped by life.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

I think that, on the whole, risk-taking entrepreneurial characters regard nature as a sort of background that we can use for our own advantage.

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

When man continues to destroy nature, he saws the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind

People today have forgotten they're really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better... They don't know it, but they're losing nature. They don't see that they're going to perish. The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

Even the wealth of the U.S. cannot protect against the levels of environmental destruction that we are unleashing.

We must use the wrath of nature as our teacher.

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

We have all this very clever technology and all these abilities to manipulate the world in all these ways, yet we are faced with the very real question of whether we can be sustainable on this planet - whether or not, in fact, we can endure.

Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.

Only people who lack wisdom would say that a project should be pursued even if it leads to wanton destruction of forests.

I'm a child of the Earth, postcode unknown.

Nature nurtures our souls and lifts our spirits. But it also sustains us and our economy - and it is for this reason that we take it for granted at our peril.