Human Intervention Quotes

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.

If a drought strikes them, animals perish--man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish--man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish--man writes the Constitution of the United States.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

An engineer can form a more handsome waterfall than any to be found in nature.

Law and Equity [justice] which God hath joined, but which man has put asunder.

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can't leave anything alone."

If we we were to intentionally set out to cause the extinction of a species, we should think about that. I would want there to be some consideration and reflection of a social consensus before we take that step.

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation.

The sheep are happier of themselves than under the care of the wolves.

We should place priority on the development of safeguards against unwise, permanent alterations in the human gene pool. Now that we have become principle agents of evolution, it is crucially important to recognize that the pursuit of short-term goals through human modification can be dangerously inconsistent with the long-term best interests of the human species.

What most people don't realize is that dams and other structures are not permanent fixtures on the landscape. They are there because we made a political decision to build them. They didn't get there by accident.

And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people — now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing its action — now more than ever before in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

When man decides he can control nature, he's in deep trouble.

If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car, wouldn't you help him?

If the artificial is not better than the natural, to what end are all the arts of life? To dig, to plow, to build, to wear clothes, are direct infringements of the injunction to follow nature.

If God had wanted these two rivers to be navigable, he could have effected it simply by a fiat, and it would be an infringement of the rights of providence to improve that which, for reasons not to be understood, it had wished to remain imperfect.

[If] man creates the problem, surely man can solve it.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

Whom God has put asunder, why should man put together?

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.

We are not expecting Utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them.