Thomas Merton Quotes

It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did.

The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in.

I don't think there's any such thing as rock n' roll anymore - it's an amalgamation of business interests.

I'm working on a very long series of paintings based on desert folklore.

Country has become too homogenized and too commercial. It has lost what makes it special. It's great that it's popular, but then it starts to become watered down.

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.

I am not a collector of deserts!

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

What man calls civilization always results in deserts.

Like the mind-set that places men above women, whites above blacks, and rich above poor, the mentality that places humans above nature is a dysfunctional delusion.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

They paved paradise and put up a parkin lot With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got till it's gone

If everybody on the planet today had the same standard of living as the average European or American, we would need three new planets. But we don't even have one new planet. We have this one, and with the way we're polluting it, the shrinking water resources, the climate change, the experimentation with plants... the outlook is grim.

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

The only thing left worth saving is wilderness.

Today we find ourselves faced with the imminent end of the era of cheap oil, the prospect (beyond the recent bubble) of steadily rising commodity prices, the degradation of forests, lakes and soils, conflicts over land use, water quality, fishing rights and the momentous challenge of stabilising concentrations of carbon in the global atmosphere.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wearsman'ssmudgeand sharesman'ssmell: thesoil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

I'm always concerned about marketing or commercial philosophies. I can't feel good about having my name on a bottle of perfume that comes from a factory making perfume with all the same ingredients as every other perfume. I can't feel good about a factory overseas polluting the air for something with my name on it. I'm okay with music - because it's digital or a CD. My music is my emotion in a bottle. But how is a perfume supposed to reflect me? How is a sweatshirt supposed to represent me?

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.

What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture.