Silent Spring Quotes

“Vouloir 'contrôler la nature' est une arrogante prétention, née d'une biologie et d'une philosophie qui en sont encore à l'âge de Néandertal, où l'on pouvait croire la nature destinée à satisfaire le bon plaisir de l'homme. Les concepts et les pratiques de l'entomologie appliquée reflètent cet âge de pierre de la science. Le malheur est qu'une si primitive pensée dispose actuellement des moyens d'action les plus puissants, et que, en orientant ses armes contre les insectes, elle les pointe aussi contre la terre.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or more ago, the towns of large areas of the United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with complete destruction as disease sweeps through the elms, carried by a beetle that would have only limited chance to build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the elms were only occasional trees in a richly diversified planting.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“With the development of chemicals with broad lethal powers, there came a sudden change in the official attitude towards the fire ant. In 1957 the United States Department of Agriculture launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history. The fire ant suddenly became the target of a barrage of government releases, motion pictures, and government-inspired stories portraying it as a despoiler of southern agriculture and a killer of birds, livestock and man. A mighty campaign was announced…”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Ino the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects, The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“The trouble is that we are seldom aware of the protection afforded by natural enemies until it fails. Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us. So it is that the activities of the insect predators and parasites are known to few. Perhaps we may have noticed an oddly shaped insect of ferocious mien on a bush in the garden and been dimly aware that the praying mantis lives at the expense of other insects. But we see with understanding eye only if we have walked in the garden at night and here and there with a flashlight have glimpsed the mantis stealthily creeping upon her prey. Then we sense something of the drama of the hunter and the hunted. Then we begin to feel something of the relentlessly pressing force by which nature controls her own.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“It was clear to the industry that Rachel Carson was a hysterical woman whose alarming view of the future could be ignored or, if necessary, suppressed. She was a “bird and bunny lover,” a woman who kept cats and was therefore clearly suspect.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Scholarships allowed her to study at Woods Hole Biological Laboratory, where she fell in love with the sea, and at Johns Hopkins University, where she was isolated, one of a handful of women in marine biology. She had no mentors and no money to continue in graduate school after completing an M.A. in zoology in 1932. Along the way she worked as a laboratory assistant in the school of public health, where she was lucky enough to receive some training in experimental genetics. As employment opportunities in science dwindled, she began writing articles about the natural history of Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun. Although these were years of financial and emotional struggle, Carson realized that she did not have to choose between science and writing, that she had the talent to do both. From childhood on, Carson was interested in”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Such poisoning of waters set aside for conservation purposes could have consequences felt by every western duck hunter and by everyone to whom the sight and sound of drifting ribbons of waterfowl across an evening sky are precious. These”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“[…] can we afford to ignore the fact that we are now filling the environment with chemicals that have the power to strike directly at the chromosomes […]? Is this not too high a price to pay for a sproutless potato or a mosquitoless patio?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“It is spread before us like the pages of an open book in which we can read why the land is what it is, and why we should preserve its integrity. But the pages lie unread.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How could intel igent 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?”
― Rachel Carson, SILENT SPRING

“Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Among the herbicides are some that are classified as 'mutagens' or agents capable of modifying the genes, the materials of heredity. We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long eons of evolution, our genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future—be it one of promise or threat.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring