Horace Bushnell Quotes

You cannot fold a flood and put it in a drawer, because the winds would find it out and tell your cedar floor.

When we destroy something crated by man we call it vandalism but when we destroy something by nature we call it progress.

It's obvious nonsense, but it makes nice people feel good about themselves to do their bit for the planet. It's vanity of a grotesque kind to believe that mankind, and our 'carbon footprint', has more impact on the future of Earth than Nature, which bends our planet to its will, as it sees fit.

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

People need to be cautious because anything built by man can be destroyed by Mother Nature.

Human beings are a wonderful virus in some ways.

Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we're actually part of? We're causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, 'I wonder where we're headed.'

The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.

The transformation of environment has become the purpose of human life; life seems real only insofar as it deals with things.

Men are weak now, and yet they transform the Earth's surface. In millions of years, their might will increase to the extent that they will change the surface of the Earth, its oceans, the atmosphere, and themselves.

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.

Some time this century, the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all natural factors.'

Nature—pitiless in a pitiless universe—is certainly not concerned with the survival of Americans or, for that matter, of any of the two billion people now inhabiting the earth.

Nature is the purest thing we can touch and observe. It can be the most beautiful and also the most devastating.

I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the Earth's surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the Earth's surface. So, for me, geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of questions and to try to think through them.

I know the power of going to Mount St. Helens, and to see that level of devastation is quite something - the power of tsunamis, etc. But it's human cruelty, the base level of humanity, that scares me most.

The lofty pine is most easily brought low by the force of the wind, and the higher the tower the greater the fall thereof.

Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are ... bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations s secure, if not the absolute permanence and equilibrium of both ... at least a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

But the whole vital process of the earth takes place so gradually and in periods of time which are so immense compared with the length of our life, that these changes are not observed, and before their course can be recorded from beginning to end whole nations perish and are destroyed.

Give wind and tide a chance to change.

No human being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the sum total of human happiness.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.

We have converted huge swaths of land and ocean into human habitats where we live and grow food and harvest energy. But there's been a sea change in the past century.

It's man's impact on our world that appeals to me more than just nature running wild.