Quotes by Rachel Carson

“A childs world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspi...”

“As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and r...”

“To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.”

“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue...”

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature...”

“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, ...”

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assur...”

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”

“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. ”

“For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yo...”

“If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”

“With these surface waters, through a series of delicately adjusted, interlocking relationship, the life of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of th...”

“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”

“Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is... we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living...”

“I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it ...”

“A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we ...”

“By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?”

“If, having endured much, we have at last asserted out "right to know," and if by knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer...”

“Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future wel...”

“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?”