A great quote can crystallise an idea or, you never know, even shift your thinking. If you’re interested in the environment and have a passion for words and ideas, you‘ll find this the best environmental quotes collection on the internet.
I’ve grouped these quotes by topic. (Different aspects of environmentalism.)
Advocacy and Change
Be the Change
Cities
Climate
Conservation and Animals
Consumerism
Countries
Earth
Economics, Business and Sustainability
Education
Energy
Environmentalism
Extreme Weather
Farming and Food
Forests
Fossil Fuels
Future
Housing, Buildings and Architecture
Human Psychology (including denialism)
Nature
Oceans
Politics
Pollution
Science
Society
Soil
Sustainable Living
Transport
Travel
Urban Agriculture
Waste
Water
Wilderness
Women
Each of these environmental quotes includes a link to find out more about the person behind the quote. There are some interesting and remarkable people behind them.
Advocacy and Change
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” ~ Alan Kay
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” ~ Alan Turing
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” ~ Albert Einstein
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” ~ Albert Einstein
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” ~ Albert Einstein
“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.” ~ Albert Einstein
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” ~ Ansel Adams
“One of the true tests of leadership is the ability to recognise a problem before it becomes an emergency.” ~ Arnold H Glasow
“Out of adversity comes opportunity.” ~ Ben Franklin
“If we wait for the meek to inherit the earth there won’t be anything left to inherit.” ~ Bob Hunter
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ Buckminster Fuller
“The trouble is you think you have time.” ~ Buddha
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~ Charles Darwin
“If we do not change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.” ~ Chinese proverb
“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls while others build windmills.” ~ Chinese proverb
“It is important we never be a spectator to unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
“The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds.” ~ Dalai Lama
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” ~ Dan Millman
“If you want to become an instrument of change, gather people in your community and host a regular conversation. The only way to succeed is to connect people, share inspiration and support one another.” ~ Deepak Chopra
“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.” ~ Fred Rogers
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
“What after all has maintained the human race on this old globe, despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not the faith in new possibilities and the courage to advocate them.” ~ Jane Addams
“Change before you have to.” ~ Jack Welch
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” ~ John Cage
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” ~ John F Kennedy
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.” ~ John F. Kennedy
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
“How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don’t want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.” ~ John Maeda
“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” ~ John Wooden
“A year from now you will wish you had started today.” ~ Karen Lamb
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” ~ Nelson Mandela
“The situation is hopeless. We must take the next step.” ~ Pablo Casals
“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” ~ Pablo Picasso (attributed also to Robert F. Kennedy)
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” ~ Dr Seuss
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” ~ Sigmund Freud
“Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.” ~ Theodore Levitt
“Discontent is the first necessity of progress.” ~ Thomas Edison
“Every moment is a new beginning.” ~ T.S. Eliot
“Nothing beautiful without struggle.” ~ Plato, ‘The Republic’
“Everything that you are against works against you. Everything that you are against can be restated in a way that puts you in support of something. When you are able to state what you are for rather than what you are against, you are focusing on the potential for positive change. Once that is in place, you will find whatever you are focusing on expanding.” ~ Wayne Dyer
“It’s not enough that we do our best. Sometimes we have to do what’s required.” ~ Winston Churchill
“The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.” ~ Winston Churchill
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Will Rogers
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” ~ Woody Allen
“If they say it can’t be done, it doesn’t always work out that way.” ~ Yogi Berra
Be The Change
“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” ~ African proverb
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” ~ Arthur Ashe
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” ~ Andy Warhol
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ~ Anne Frank
“Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” ~ Buddha
“We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety, a hundred years at the very most. During that period we must try to do something good, something useful with our lives.” ~ Dalai Lama
“Action is the antidote to despair.” ~ Edward Abbey
“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” ~ E. M. Forster
“The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world.” ~ James Baldwin
“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of a difference you want to make.” ~ Jane Goodall
“We have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place – or not bother.” ~ Jane Goodall
“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” ~ John Wooden
“Against the ruin of the world, the only defense is the creative act.” ~ Kenneth Rexroth
“People may doubt what you say, but they’ll believe what you do.” ~ Lewis Cass
“I always wondered why somebody doesn’t do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.” ~ Lily Tomlin
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” ~ Maya Angelou
“If you walk the talk, you don’t have to talk that much.” ~ Michael Reynolds
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” ~ Paul Coelho
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” ~ Robert Swan
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” ~ Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
“Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.” ~ Walter Anderson
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” ~ William James
Cars
“If you invite more cars, you get more cars. If you make more streets better for cars you get more traffic. If you make more bicycle infrastructure you get more bicycles. If you invite people to walk more and use public spaces more, you get more life in the city. You get what you invite.” ~ Jan Gehl
“We know the majority of the world’s population are going to live in dense cities. There will simply not be room for all of us to have a car.” ~ Jan Gehl
(See also our collection of Jan Gehl quotes.)
“The second mode [to deal with unsafe cities] is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.” Jane Jacobs
“In the United States we spent the last century building our cities around the car, but we damaged our cities in the process and we’re really getting diminishing returns on that investment.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
“No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is still a car. An electric car is still a car. An e-hail car is still a car. All the techie fairy dust in the world can’t turn cars into the liberators of all the street space they dominate.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
“Our streets for too long have just been looked at as a place to move cars as fast as possible, from point A to point B, or to just serve as parking lots. And these cars basically sit on the side of the road unused 98 percent of the time. That’s not a really good use of one of the most precious resources a city has: its streets.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
(See also our collection of Janette Sadik-Khan quotes.)
“Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.” ~ Lewis Mumford
“The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.” ~ Lewis Mumford
“If you demolish the whole city for the flow of traffic, what destination for that traffic would be left?” Marc van Woudenberg
Cities
“The mark of a great city isn’t how it treats its special places – everybody does that right – but how it treats its ordinary ones.” ~ Aaron M. Renn
“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” ~ Bill Vaughan
“Growth is inevitable and desirable, but the destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how.” ~ Edward T. McMahon
“An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it’s where even the rich use public transportation” ~ Enrique Peñalosa
“Everyone has the right to live in a great place. More importantly, everyone has the right to contribute to making the place where they already live great.” ~ Fred Kent
“If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places” ~ Fred Kent
“They can print statistics and count the population in hundreds of thousands, but to each man, a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people.” ~ Graham Greene
“The modern city is probably the most unlovely and artificial site this planet affords. The ultimate solution is to abandon it. We shall solve the City Problem by leaving the city.” ~ Henry Ford
“The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.” ~ James Kunstler
“What’s bad about sprawl is not its uniformity but that it is uniformly bad.” ~ James Kunstler
“In the United States we spent the last century building our cities around the car, but we damaged our cities in the process and we’re really getting diminishing returns on that investment.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
“Our streets for too long have been looked at as a place to move cars as fast as possible or to just serve as parking lots.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
“You have to design your streets for everyone. The cities that have safe streets, that are easy to get around, are the ones that will grow and thrive in the 21st Century.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
(See also our collection of Janette Sadik-Khan quotes.)
“First we shape the cities – then they shape us.” ~ Jan Gehl
“The main focus of urban planning has been to keep the cars happy.” ~ Jan Gehl
“If you have people walk and bicycle more, you have a more lively, more liveable, more attractive, more safe, more sustainable and more healthy city. What are you waiting for?” ~ Jan Gehl
(See also our collection of Jan Gehl quotes.)
“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance because they have people in abundance.” ~ Jane Jacobs
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” ~ Jane Jacobs
“We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programs – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make a serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy, and freedom.” Jonathan Raban
“The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn urban forms condition mind.” ~ Lewis Mumford
“The trouble with the rat race is that, even if you win, you’re still a rat.” ~ Lily Tomlin
“Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination.” ~ Paul Goldberger
“City living by its definition is crowded. It is tolerant of other people. It is dependent on a sophisticated population that makes a hundred compromises daily so that they can benefit from the collective energy that a city generates.” ~ Robert N. Davis
“Bringing nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl. If cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn’t be touched.” ~ Stone Gossard
“It is difficult to design a place that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.” William H. Whyte
Climate Change
“By the clock of geology, this climate shift is unfolding at a dizzying, perhaps unprecedented pace, but by time scales relevant to people, it’s happening in slow motion.” ~ Andrew Revkin (from ‘Yelling ‘Fire’ on a Hot Planet’ New York Times)
“I don’t really consider climate change a political issue, I consider it to be a moral issue.” ~ Al Gore
“We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.” ~ Barack Obama
“Physics doesn’t care what your spin is.” ~ Bill McKibben
“Winning slowly is the same as losing.” ~ Bill McKibben
“If you’re asking when climate change is going to “happen,” you’re really asking when’s it going to happen to “me” because it’s already happened to many other people.” ~ Eric Roston
“World War 2/climate change analogies are inadequate because in World War 2 we only had to fight Nazis, and today we have to fight climate change AND Nazis.” ~ Eric Roston
“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.” ~ Greta Thunberg
“On climate change we have to acknowledge that we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so. And the media has failed to create broad public awareness. But Homo sapiens have not yet failed.” ~ Greta Thunberg
“The main solution is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop the emission of greenhouse gases.” ~ Greta Thunberg
“Some people say that we are not doing enough to fight climate change. But that is not true. Because to “not do enough” you have to do something. And the truth is we are basically not doing anything.” ~ Greta Thunberg
“To all of you who choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself. Your silence is worst of all.” ~ Greta Thunberg
(See also our collection of best Greta Thunberg quotes.)
“What’s the difference between a 2 degree world and a 4 degree world? Human civilisation.” ~ Professor John Schellnhuber
“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.” ~ Margaret Atwood
“In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.” ~ Naomi Klein
“Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.” ~ Naomi Klein
“The great thing about the dilemma we’re in is that we get to re-imagine every single thing we do…There isn’t a single thing that doesn’t require a complete remake. There are two ways of looking at that. One is: Oh my gosh, what a big burden. The other way, which I prefer, is: What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change the world.” – Paul Hawken
Conservation and Animals
“Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~ Albert Einstein
“We are forever responsible for that which we have tamed.” ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” ~ Immanuel Kant
“The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?” ~ David Attenborough
“Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, yet we’re destroying the only home we have.” ~ Jane Goodall (See also our collection of Jane Goodall quotes.)
“A true conservationist knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.” ~ John James Audubon
“In the end, or society will be defined not only by what we create, but what we refuse to destroy.” ~ John Sawhill
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.” ~ Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘The Life of the Bee’
“I am a conservative. You can’t get more conservative than being a conservationist. Our entire raison d’etre is to conserve and protect.” ~ Paul Watson
Consumerism
“Every time you spend money you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.” ~ Anna Lappe
“The best things in life aren’t things.” ~ Art Buchwald
“Any advertisement in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” ~ Banksy
“We used to build civilisation. Now we build shopping malls.” ~ Bill Bryson
“No matter how many toys we amass we leave them behind when we die, just as we leave a broken environment, an economy that only benefits the richest, and a legacy of empowering greed over goodness. It is now time to commit to following a new path.” ~ John Perkins
“The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed,” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.” ~ Steven Wright
“Buy less, choose well, make it last.” ~ Vivienne Westwood
Countries
Australia
“In Australia you can’t tell where the coal industry ends and the federal government begins.” ~ Naomi Klein
Cycling
“A protected bicycle lane in a city in a developing country is a powerful symbol, showing that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is as important as one in a $30,000 car.” ~ Enrique Peñalosa
“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” ~ H.G. Wells
“Biking is not alternative transportation. It’s basic transportation.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
“Where bikes are perceived as a nuisance it’s often just a symptom of outdated street designs.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
Earth
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.” ~ American Indian proverb
“It’s surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us but for all life on Earth.” ~ David Attenborough
“The Earth is a fine place and worth fighting for.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
“If the Earth was an apartment, we wouldn’t be getting our security deposit back.” ~ Jim Shubert
“Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?” ~ Jane Goodall
“Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future”. ~ John F. Kennedy
“Let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” ~ John F. Kennedy
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.” ~ John Keats
“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
“The Earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.” ~ Pope John Paul II
“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can’t destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing.” ~ Paulo Coelho, ‘The Winner Stands Alone’
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as life lasts.” ~ Rachel Carson
“We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to.” ~ Terry Swearingen
“The earth is what we all have in common.” ~ Wendell Berry
“The earth has music for those who listen.” ~ William Shakespeare
Economics, Business and Sustainability
“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, the last river is polluted and when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.” ~ Alanis Obomsawin
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” ~ Albert Einstein
“To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative but much better than the world we have now.” ~ Alex Steffen
“All must pay the debt of nature.” ~ Annie Proulx, ‘Barkskins’
“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist.” ~ David Attenborough
“If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.” ~ David Suzuki
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” ~ Edward Abbey
“The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.” ~ Herman E. Daly
“There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.” ~ Herman E. Daly
“To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.” ~ Murray Bookchin
“At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world if we are not paying attention to it ― if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature give us for free: clean air, clean water, breathtaking vistas, mountains for skiing, rivers for fishing, oceans for sailing, sunsets for poets, and landscapes for painters. What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can’t see anything green during the day? Just because we can’t sell shares in nature doesn’t mean it has no value.” ~ Thomas L. Friedman, (From ‘Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America’)
“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.” ~ T.S. Eliot
“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.” ~ Vandana Shiva, (From ‘Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis’)
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.” ~ Wendell Berry
Education
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.” ~ Baba Dioum
“No one will protect what they don’t care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced.” ~ David Attenborough
“Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means “to draw out.” What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us ‘open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated planet.’ The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.” ~ David Orr
“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” ~ Nelson Mandela
“An environment-based education will help students realize that school isn’t supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.” ~ Richard Louv, ‘Last Child in the Woods’
“You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own that they must protect.” ~ Wangari Maathai
“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” ~ Wendell Berry
Energy
“The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.” ~ Ralph Nader
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy—sun, wind, and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” ~ Thomas Edison
“Don’t get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It’s just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there’s an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it’s wireless!” ~ William McDonough
Environmentalism
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make-believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” ~ Aldo Leopold
“If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.” ~ Barry Commoner
Extreme Weather
“Fire destroys that which feeds it.” ~ Simone Weil
Farming and Food
“The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else’s responsibility until I’m ready to eat it.” ~ Joel Salatin, (From ‘Folks, This Ain’t Normal’)
“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.” ~ Joel Salatin, (From ‘Folks, This Ain’t Normal’)
“We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse – we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.” ~ Joel Salatin
“You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.” ~ Joel Salatin, (From ‘Holy Cows and Hog Heaven‘)
“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.” ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, (From ‘Eating Animals’)
“Eat food. Not much. Mostly plants.” ~ Michael Pollan
“As far as food is concerned, the great extravagance is not caviar or truffles, but beef, pork and poultry.” ~ Peter Singer, (From ‘Practical Ethics’)
Forests
“The old forests are going and once they are gone we will have to wait a thousand years or more to see their like. Though nothing will be allowed such a generous measure of time to grow.” ~ Annie Proulx (from ‘Barkskins’)
“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.” ~ Chris Maser (from ‘Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest’)
“Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” ~ John Muir
“Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers” ~ Peter Singer
Fossil Fuels
“If it is wrong to wreck the planet, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage.” ~ Bill McKibben
“The first rule of holes is that when you are in one, stop digging.” ~ Bill McKibben
“We need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.” ~ Bill McKibben
“Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.” ~ Carl Sagan from ‘Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium’
“Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. We can’t save the world by playing by the rules. The rules have to be changed.” ~ Greta Thunberg
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy – sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” ~ Thomas Edison
Future
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” ~ Alan Kay
“The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we’re ready for it.” ~ Arnold H. Glasow
“Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?” ~ Groucho Marx
“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
“The future depends on what we do in the present.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” ~ Malcolm X
“We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
“But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that 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.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
Housing, Buildings and Architecture
“Whether it’s beautiful or not, if it doesn’t take care of itself and the people in it, it’s as bad as a sinking ship – which is what most of it is.” ~ Michael Reynolds
“If every building was to consume its own sewerage that’d be huge. Then if every building made its own power, and heated and cooled itself, and caught its own water rather then sucking water out of the aquifers – the ramifications of how people live in their own units could affect things in an unbelievable way. Ultimately it would affect the minds and hearts of people.” ~ Michael Reynolds
“People can live in carbon zero homes right now. The technology is here. Allowing it to happen is the problem. Our rules and regulations won’t let us do it.” ~ Michael Reynolds
“I see my work as an exploration of how to remove stress. That’s not necessarily architecture.” ~ Michael Reynolds
“If you took stress out of people’s lives and made them happy in terms of the way they live – if you made it easy for them to be at peace on this planet – they would bloom. And I think humanity could go to a whole different level.” ~ Michael Reynolds
(See also our collection of the best Michael Reynolds quotes.)
“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” ~ Henry David Thoreau (from ‘Familiar Letters’)
“The scale of our homes should be derived from the real needs of our daily lives, not from vanity, insecurity, or a need for public display. Home should be the setting for life, not the measure of it.” ~ James Gauer
“I am of the opinion that architecture should exist quietly with nature, never opposing it. I am positive that a choice between these alternatives no longer applies. Architecture and nature should be integrated. Both should be part of our daily life.” ~ Yasuhiro Yamashita
Human Psychology (including denialism)
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” ~ Albert Einstein
“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.” ~ Bill McKibben (from ‘The End of Nature’)
“From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change.” ~ David Suzuki
“We’re in a giant car heading toward a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.” ~ David Suzuki
“There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” ~ Douglas Adams
“We spend more time developing means of escaping our troubles than we do solving the troubles we’re trying to escape from.” ~ David Lloyd
“Every day, I am torn between the desire to save the world and the desire to savour the world. This makes it very hard to plan the day.” ~ E.B. White
“People would rather believe than know.” ~ Edward O. Wilson
“The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” ~ Gaylord Nelson
“How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, ‘No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don’t care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.’ Wouldn’t world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?” Joel Salatin (from ‘Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front’)
“Most people are on the world, not in it – having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them.” ~ John Muir
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
“If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.” ~ Joseph Wood Krutch
“The difference between what we are doing and what we are capable of doing would solve most of the world’s problems.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“We have the potential to enhance the planet. Trees enhance the planet. People could go further. We could make the Earth sing.” ~ Michael Reynolds
“It’s like the gravity of the Earth. There’s a gravity of human nature that makes it hard to think in any other way than the way that’s here.” ~ Michael Reynolds
“The major problems in the world are the result of the differences between the way nature works and the way people think.” ~ Gregory Bateson
“The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.” ~ Norman Cousins
“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.” ~ Rachel Carson
Nature
Nature – conservation
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” ~ Albert Einstein
“When we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.” ~ Ed Begley Jnr
“Wildness is the preservation of the World.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“The Earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.” ~ John Paul II
“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.” ~ Rachel Carson
Nature – how it works
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” ~ John Muir
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”~ Lao Tzu
“Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature – our place in it
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” ~ Carl Sagan
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together … all things connect.” ~ Chief Seattle
“Cherish the natural world because you’re part of it and you depend on it.” ~ David Attenborough (See also our collection of the best David Attenborough quotes.)
“You can’t divorce civilization from nature – we totally depend on it.” ~ James Balog
“We as a culture are forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very, very deep connection with nature.” ~ James Balog
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” ~ Gary Snyder
“The Earth is what we all have in common.” ~ Wendell Berry
Nature – restoration
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” ~ Audrey Hepburn
“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” ~ Chinese proverb
“We have the potential to enhance the planet. Trees enhance the planet. People could go further. We could make the Earth sing.” ~ Michael Reynolds
Nature – the beauty of
“The miracle of nature is right there in front of you.” ~ David Attenborough (See also our collection of the best David Attenborough quotes.)
“Beauty will save the world.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.” ~ Helen Keller
“God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.” ~ John Muir
“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.” ~ John Ruskin
“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.” ~ John Ruskin
“When you go out there (into the wilderness), you don’t get away from it all, you get back to it all. You come home to what’s important. You come home to yourself.” ~ Peter Dombrovskis
“The earth laughs in flowers.”~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh
“Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?” ~ Walt Disney
Nature – the joy and healing power of
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” ~ Albert Einstein
“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.” ~ David Attenborough (See also our collection of the best David Attenborough quotes.)
“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.” ~ Jimmy Carter
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” ~ John Muir
“We can never have enough of Nature.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“I love not Man the less, but Nature more.” ~ Lord Byron
“Man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; [the Lakota] knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.” ~ Luther Standing Bear
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” ~ Rachel Carson
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.'” ~ Sylvia Plath
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” ~ William Shakespeare
Nature – travel in
“Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints!” ~ Chief Seattle
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.” ~ Edward Abbey
“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.” ~ John Muir
“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain, or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” ~ John Muir
“The mountains are calling and I must go.” ~ John Muir
Nature – versus humankind
“This we know; The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know, all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.” ~ Chief Seattle
“How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen.” ~ Victor Hugo
“Men argue. Nature acts.” ~ Voltaire
Nature – versus technology
“Time spent in nature is the most cost-effective and powerful way to counteract the burnout and sort of depression that we feel when we sit in front of a computer all day.” ~ Richard Louv
“What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology?” ~ Richard Louv (from ‘The Nature Principle’)
“Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it.” ~ Richard Louv (from ‘Last Child in the Woods’)
Nature – wilderness
“Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.” ~ Charles Lindbergh
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” ~ Henry David Thoreau (from ‘Walden: Or, Life in the Woods’)
“When you go out there (into the wilderness), you don’t get away from it all, you get back to it all. You come home to what’s important. You come home to yourself.” ~ Peter Dombrovskis
Oceans
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
“You wouldn’t think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we’ll do it one day. That’s how negligent we are.” ~ Ian Rankin
“The cure for anything is saltwater – sweat, tears, or the sea.” ~ Isak Dinesen (pen name of Karen Blixen)
“The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat.” ~ Jacques Cousteau
“If we wipe out the fish, the oceans are going to die. If the oceans die, we die. We can’t live on this planet with a dead ocean.” ~ Paul Watson (See also our collection of Paul Watson quotes.)
“Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.” ~ Sylvia Earle
Politics and progress
“We’re not going to win by changing light globes. We need you to be deeply, politically engaged.” ~ Bill McKibben
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
“If solutions within this system are so impossible to find then maybe we should change the system itself.” ~ Greta Thunberg
“Our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy is physics. And we cannot make “deals” with physics.” ~ Greta Thunberg
“Some say that we should not engage in activism, instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?” ~ Greta Thunberg
“Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible there is no hope.” ~ Greta Thunberg
“We know most politicians don’t want to talk to us. Good, we don’t want to talk to them either. We want them to talk to the scientists instead.” ~ Greta Thunberg
(See also our best Greta Thunberg quotes.)
“Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” ~ John F Kennedy
“We need a national political leader to step forward, an environmental Churchill, to rally the world around this effort.” ~ Lester R. Brown
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” ~ Mark Twain
Pollution
“People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.” ~ Ha-Joon Chang (from ‘23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism’)
“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.” ~ Jacques-Yves Cousteau
“We tend to think of environmental catastrophes—such as the Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in the Bay of Alaska—as “accidents”: isolated phenomena that erupt without notice or warning. But when does the word accident become inappropriate? When are such occurrences inevitable rather than accidental? And when does a consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?” ~ Murray Bookchin
“We have met the enemy and he is us.” ~ Walt Kelly
Science
“The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.” ~ Barry Commoner
“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy … And to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. We scientists don’t know how to do that.” ~ Gus Speth
Society
“To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I – or does anyone else – have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?” ~ Derrick Jensen (from ‘Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization‘)
“The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.” ~ Joel Salatin (from ‘Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front’)
“We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.” ~ Margaret Mead
“Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.” ~ Murray Bookchin
Soil
“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
Sustainable Living
“Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver (from her book ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life’)
“Going back to a simpler life is not a step backward.” ~ Yvon Chouinard
Transport
“For cities to be livable people need to have freedom of choice in terms of mobility. According to what your daily needs are, you can walk, you can bicycle, you can take public transport.” ~ Helle Søholt
“We can easily make cities where you don’t need individual cars for each individual’s transportation.” ~ Jan Gehl
“In Copenhagen, it’s considered to be much smarter to use the Metro (public transport) or bicycle than to try to drill your car into congestion in the city.” ~ Jan Gehl
(See also our collection of Jan Gehl quotes.)
“Streets are where life and history happen, and that places transportation at the cultural, social, and political center of cities.” ~ Janette Sadik-Khan
See also our collection of Janette Sadik-Khan quotes.
Urban Agriculture
“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.” ~ Wendell Berry (from ‘The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays’)
Water
“Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom – and lakes die.” ~ Gil Scott-Heron
“We never know the worth of water until the well is dry.” ~ Thomas Fuller
Women
“The world will be saved by the Western woman.” ~ The Dalai Lama
Environmental quotes – what say you?
Got a classic you think should be on our best environmental quotes list? What do you think of our collection? Let us know in the Comments.
Related article
Environmental Quotes by Green Leaders
We’ve written profiles and interviewed the world’s environmental leaders. Along the way we’ve compiled the best quotes about the environment and sustainability from each.
