Ian Rankin Quotes

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

Walking in the mountains helps me unwind, but it also reminds me in a painful way that the real beauty in life is nature and animals, and that the human race, in all its arrogance, is intent on destroying it.

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

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.

The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

I don't think the planet can survive people. It's not the other way around. I don't think the planet can survive.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.

White males are the most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death.

We cannot but feel uneasy about the losses caused by humanity themselves. Apart from the losses of life and property in destructive wars, the environment and natural resources are also being destroyed by human hands.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

The white man is destroying the world.

Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore,, Currents of debris upon my breast.

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

As cruel a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

The whole of nature cries out at our mistreatment of her. If the planet were a patient, we would have treated her long ago.

People who work in diamonds and in oil wreck a lot of the Earth and a lot of the people on it.

We humans have this idea that the ocean is so big, so vast, so resilient that it doesn't matter what we do to it. That may have been true 1,000 years ago. But in the last 100, especially the last 50 years, we have destroyed the assets that make our lives possible.

We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival.

It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.