Utah Phillips Quotes

Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

I think it was a realization of this cancer, an understanding of the broader implications of what cancer is. The greed, the ravaging of lands and seas for profit, the taking of things that don't belong to us; what we've done to the environment in this fast-paced, careless hunger. I think all of that was happening in my body.

The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

Pollution is a serious one. Water pollution, air pollution, and then solid hazardous waste pollution. And then beyond that, we also have the resources issue. Not just water resources but other natural resources, the mining resources being consumed, and the destruction of our ecosystem.

Quite honestly, if we do manage to destroy the planet with our devil-may-care attitude to natural resources, I'd suggest we leave, as a dossier in our defence, the collected letters to agony aunts and uncles down the generations. It would certainly prove that we weren't all bad!

The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.

The planet's environmental woes tend to be overlooked as we scramble for the latest high-tech gizmos - and conveniently ignore their energy consumption.

Nature generally struggles against this treatment for a while, until her powers seem in a great measure exhausted, when she quietly yields to the power of the art.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!

Children, be worried when they call you America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they've done to the other natural resources?

Capitalism is destroying the earth.

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.

Capitalism is a cancer in the biosphere.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

There's no country in the world that's more devastated from natural resources than Afghanistan.

Business is destroying the world, with flair, expertise, and panache.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

You know, the environment is fragmenting, and the environment is, in many places, absolutely hideous!

We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart.

Ignorance, hatred and greed are killing nature.

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