Rachel Carson Quotes
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To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view.
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It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.
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the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But the solution seems always to bring with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last, final mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I cherish a very unscientific hope that they will not be.
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The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance.
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Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.
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Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.
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The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
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In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.
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Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.
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The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.
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By suggestion and example, I believe children can be helped to hear the many voices about them. Take Time to listen and talk about the voices of the earth and what they mean-the majestic voice of thunder, the winds, the sound of surf or flowing streams.
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The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind - that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. . . . Now I can believe I have at least helped a little.
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We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.
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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 to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.
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For all at last return to the sea- to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.
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[Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me that usually means many, many revisions.
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Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment-a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.
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Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.
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It is not half so important to know as to feel.
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One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew i would never see it again?
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Until we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in the world. There can be no double standard. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.
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When any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end as natural. When that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.
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How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?
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Darling -- I suppose the world would consider us absolutely crazy, but it is wonderful to feel that way, isn't it? Sort of a perpetual springtime in our hearts.
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To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.
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There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.
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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 resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
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The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
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The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.
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No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
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