Sylvia Earle Quotes

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.

Some have more capacity. Some proceed a few steps along the way. But Christ seemed to love all men. He desired all to be saved.

Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down -- toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.

Our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.

Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

Fortunately, we know more about the problems that we have than in all preceding history. We know now the consequences of the things that we put into the air, into the water - of the way we treat life on Earth.

Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power, but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.

For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste.

If I put myself on the side of those who see the world as warming up in a bad way, who see the general march of industrial culture as something undesirable, the one thing I must be beware of doing and which my colleagues on that side don't beware of doing, we must beware of saying we've got to stop changing the environment. There is no 'the' environment which we can change, the world is changing all the time.

No matter who you are, you have the nature and capacity for leadership.

I don't believe there's a hole in the ground with demons in it but I could be wrong. Hell is all around us - it's the way we treat each other and the way we treat the Earth. We already live in it.

Polite conservationists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.

Every individual human being born on this earth has the capacity to become a unique and special person, unlike any who has ever existed before or ever will exist again.

Let only individuals contribute - with sensible limits per election. Otherwise, we are well on our way to ensuring that a government of the moneyed, by the moneyed, and for the moneyed shall not perish from the earth.

The city atmosphere certainly has improved her. Some way she doesn't seem like the same woman.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

The most precious contribution we can make here on Earth is to create the lives we want to be living, communicating in all ways, to everyone around us, that success is really possible.

Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused.

The greatest ability in the whole human race and all amongst the livingness, is the ability to help. And when you can improve that ability all the way up along the line, you've improved about all there is to improve about a person.

Nothing is costed properly and it's destroying the earth. We need to re-educate people that what is good for the planet is good for the financial system.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.