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GO GREEN QUOTES: 30 good thoughts on environment and environmentalism

Last updated: March 26th, 2019

Flowers - Quotes about the environmentEarth Day is every day! These 30 thoughtful environment quotes are penned by ecologists, politicians, activists and other great environmentalists.

Keep close to nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean. – John Muir

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. – Aldo Leopold

Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved. – Bill Bradley

If we do not permit the Earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either. – Joseph Wood Krutch

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. – Albert Einstein

Forest - Quotes about the environmentA tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes—those you can, in part, see. But it is more—it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots—a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one. – Elizabeth Moon

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

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order. – John Burroughs

After all, sustainability means running the global environment—Earth Inc.—like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital. – Maurice Strong

Two children - Quotes about the environmentIf you violate nature’s laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. – Luther Burbank

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

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

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.
– Mahatma Gandhi

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. – Wendell Berry

Four girls jumping - Quotes about the environmentWe cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men. – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. – John Lubbock

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught. – Victoria Principal

When people align around shared political, social, economic or environmental values, and take collective action, thinking and behaviour that compromises the lives of millions of people around the world can truly change. – Simon Mainwaring

Grapes - Quotes about the environmentThe industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company’s bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy. – Daniel Goleman

The poetry of the Earth is never dead. – John Keats

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? – Henry David Thoreau

In today’s world, it is no longer unimaginable to think that business can operate—and even thrive—in an environmentally-friendly manner. – Olympia Snowe

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. Why don’t they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us? – Paulo Coelho

When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can’t eat money. – John May


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