Kirkpatrick Sale Quotes

Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.

The Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.

The destruction of the earth’s environment is the human rights challenge of our time.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

We all see that, today, man can destroy the foundation of his existence: his Earth.

I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.

We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

People thought they could explain and conquer nature-yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.

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

Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

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

It wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it.

Human use, population, and technology have reached that certain stage where mother Earth no longer accepts our presence with silence.

We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

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.

The 20th century peatlands ditching in Finland was the worst human environmental destruction action in Europe.

Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.

Science has failed our mother Earth.

In the past few decades, Earth's natural systems have endured more pressure than in all preceding human history.

In reality, the main thing that keeps me awake at night is probably the destruction of the planet that's what gets me pretty upset.

We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.

A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end.... They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from doing what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough.

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

Humans may be destroying their chances for decent survival. It won't kill everybody, but it would change the world dramatically.