Top 40 Barry Commoner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.”

— Barry Commoner

Featured in: Environment Quotes

2. “The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.”

— Barry Commoner

Featured in: Nature Quotes

3. “Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.”

— Barry Commoner

4. “The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.”

— Barry Commoner

5. “Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you don’t put something in the ecology, it’s not there.”

— Barry Commoner

6. “The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.”

— Barry Commoner

7. “When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.”

— Barry Commoner

8. “World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.”

— Barry Commoner

9. “Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.”

— Barry Commoner

10. “Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.”

— Barry Commoner

11. “The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production – in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation – essential as they are, make people sick and die.”

— Barry Commoner

12. “The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.”

— Barry Commoner

13. “If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.”

— Barry Commoner

14. “In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.”

— Barry Commoner

15. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”

— Barry Commoner

16. “Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.”

— Barry Commoner

17. “As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world – most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world’s poor.”

— Barry Commoner

18. “What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point – the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.”

— Barry Commoner

19. “No action is without its side effects.”

— Barry Commoner

20. “The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment-and ourselves.”

— Barry Commoner

21. “The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.”

— Barry Commoner

22. “For that reason the simple test of the slogan ‘Consume Less’ as a basis for social action on the environment would be to tell it to the blacks in the ghetto. The message will not be very well received for there are many people in this country who consume less than is needed to sustain a decent life.”

— Barry Commoner

23. “If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.”

— Barry Commoner

24. “All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.”

— Barry Commoner

25. “Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’”

— Barry Commoner

26. “The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.”

— Barry Commoner

27. “My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.”

— Barry Commoner

28. “Nothing ever goes away.”

— Barry Commoner

29. “What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.”

— Barry Commoner

30. “Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.”

— Barry Commoner

31. “Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.”

— Barry Commoner

32. “The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.”

— Barry Commoner

33. “Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.”

— Barry Commoner

34. “Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.”

— Barry Commoner

35. “Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline – which prevented it from entering the environment.”

— Barry Commoner

36. “In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.”

— Barry Commoner

37. “In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.”

— Barry Commoner

38. “The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.”

— Barry Commoner

39. “If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.”

— Barry Commoner

40. “It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.”

— Barry Commoner

41. “The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.”

— Barry Commoner

42. “By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.”

— Barry Commoner

43. “It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.”

— Barry Commoner

44. “The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.”

— Barry Commoner

45. “The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts – even widely known ones – that were outside their limited field of vision.”

— Barry Commoner

46. “I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.”

— Barry Commoner

47. “In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.”

— Barry Commoner

48. “After all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it – removing that advantage for all firms.”

— Barry Commoner