Jules Verne Quotes

Walking in the mountains helps me unwind, but it also reminds me in a painful way that the real beauty in life is nature and animals, and that the human race, in all its arrogance, is intent on destroying it.

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one.

People in general romanticize nature, and they make it out to be something that it isn't because humans are so awful. And yes, we are absolutely screwing up this planet, but that is only because we have the capabilities to do so. Animals are not better than us. They are not nicer than us.

Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness.

It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.

We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.

The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

Man marks the earth with ruin - his control stops with the shore.

We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.

The problems are our lives. In the "developed" countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.

I feel like humans are a disease. It's a hard thing to communicate in a pop song. I mean, who wants to hear that?

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.

We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.

Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.

Oh! You're the people ruining the rivers.

We are the only species systematically destroying its own habitat.

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover.

Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.

We're a part of nature. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. It's a selfish thing to want to protect nature.

Man has injured every animal he has touched.

There are two kinds of power. One is power over, which is always destructive, and the other is power from within, which is a transcendent and creative power.