Rachel Carson Quotes

I have impeached myself by resigning.

Someone needs to tell the truth, but it shouldn't be my job.

To the extent that I considered the personal burden of harming the people who had trusted me, plus the Agency, or the United States, I wasn't processing that.

There are things you can't walk away from. Not if you want to live with yourself afterward.

A man should not play the coward to his deeds. He should not repudiate them once he has performed them. Pangs of conscience are indecent.

We cannot avert our eyes without staining our souls.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.

Ethical is 'I'll wait and do what's right even in the hardest times and even if I have to give up gains to do it.'

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

If you don't speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?

Living with a conscience is like driving with the brakes on.

You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.

We must differentiate between guilt and duty. The soldier on the front, like the common man, who does his duty everywhere, should not be held responsible for the actions of a few who also called themselves Germans.

I've never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.

I could not permit my silence and my inaction to be construed as condonation.... With my tongue tied by the confidentiality demanded of me by law, there was only one way I could make a statement that something was wrong. I chose it. I resigned.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.

What is done cannot be effaced. We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us ...

doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right

We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we could have prevented.

If I saw someone in need and I did nothing, I'd be defacing my own humanity.