Pope Paul VI Quotes

Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

The only clear thing is that we humans are the only species with the power to destroy the earth as we know it. The birds have no such power, nor do the insects, nor does any mammal. Yet if we have the capacity to destroy the earth, so, too, do we have the capacity to protect it.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

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

There are serious problems that have to do with the environment, that have to do with the way in which we live and consume.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

his planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken.

The message from all quarters is the same: our undisciplined consumption must end. If we continue to gobble up our resources without any regard to stewardship and to spew out our deadly wastes over land, sea, and air, we may well be drawing down the final curtain upon ourselves.

The planet will adapt to anything. Maybe we should start to use the heart and the brain that we've been given to organize ourselves. Because if we keep screwing up things, we may be just passing by in the history of the planet.

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

In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

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

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.

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.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

My perspective is the Earth will be here. It just may not be habitable to our life form. We get confused. We think we're the center of everything.

The mature Anthropocene begins when we acquire the ability to live sustainably and become a lasting presence on this world.

Planet Earth is far more resilient than humans and will certainly outlive us.

Most times, Mother Earth's resources are used up without the realisation that these thoughtless actions might just be the root cause for the hardships future generations may face. It is everyone's responsibility to hand over a green, clean, and healthy environment to them.

The recent upsurge of public concern over environmental questions reflects a belated recognition that man has been too cavalier in his relations with nature. Unless we arrest the depredations that have been inflicted so carelessly on our natural systems-which exist in an intricate set of balances-we face the prospect of ecological disaster.

You know that the air and water are being polluted, as is everything we touch and live with, and we go on corrupting the nature that we need. We don't realize we have a commitment to God to take care of nature. To cut down a tree, to waste water when there is so much lack of it, to let buses poison our atmosphere with those noxious fumes from their exhausts, to burn rubbish haphazardly-all that concerns our alliance with God.