Top 50 David R. Brower Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no business on a dead planet.”

— David R. Brower

2. “All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.”

— David R. Brower

3. “The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.”

— David R. Brower

4. “Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of that problem. It has to be addressed.”

— David R. Brower

5. “Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever.”

— David R. Brower

6. “Bring diversity back to agriculture. That’s what made it work in the first place.”

— David R. Brower

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

7. “There is more inside you than you dare think.”

— David R. Brower

8. “I’m always impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it’s impossible.”

— David R. Brower

9. “Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.”

— David R. Brower

10. “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

— David R. Brower

11. “Without wilderness, the world’s a cage.”

— David R. Brower

12. “Have fun saving the world, or you are just going to depress yourself.”

— David R. Brower

Featured in: Fun Quotes

13. “Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.”

— David R. Brower

14. “Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people.”

— David R. Brower

15. “You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”

— David R. Brower

16. “To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.”

— David R. Brower

17. “We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.”

— David R. Brower

18. “We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.”

— David R. Brower

19. “The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.”

— David R. Brower

20. “There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river.”

— David R. Brower

21. “Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.”

— David R. Brower

22. “People have alleged that I have inspired many young people over the years, but I say, it was just the opposite.”

— David R. Brower

23. “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”

— David R. Brower

24. “Polite conversationalists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.”

— David R. Brower

25. “Sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this.”

— David R. Brower

26. “I was actually telling people that – by harnessing the atom – we could enter a new era of unlimited power that would do away with the need to dam our beautiful streams.”

— David R. Brower

27. “When people say, ‘You’re not being realistic,’ they’re just trying to tag some thoughts that they can’t otherwise handle.”

— David R. Brower

28. “The Peninsula is what we have and there is no more where it came from.”

— David R. Brower

29. “What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.”

— David R. Brower

30. “Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine.”

— David R. Brower

31. “The Sierra Club is a very good and a very powerful force for conservation and, as a matter of fact, has grown faster since I left than it was growing while I was there! It must be doing something right.”

— David R. Brower

32. “While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind.”

— David R. Brower

33. “Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms-the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning.”

— David R. Brower

34. “I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, if he really understands the cost of not giving it up. In fact, we may find that, while we’re drastically cutting our energy consumption, we’re actually raising our standard of living.”

— David R. Brower

35. “If something’s going wrong with this planet we’d better fix it here and not look for some sort of escape.”

— David R. Brower

36. “We may learn anew what compassion and beauty are, and pause to listen to the Earth’s music.”

— David R. Brower

37. “It is absolutely imperative that we protect, preserve and pass on this genetic heritage for man and every other living thing in as good a condition as we received it.”

— David R. Brower

38. “Politics is democracy’s way of handling public business. We won’t get the type of country in the kind of world we want unless people take part in the public’s business.”

— David R. Brower

39. “If you want to get people off drugs, improve reality.”

— David R. Brower

40. “We cannot go on fiddling while the earth’s wild places burn...”

— David R. Brower

41. “Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.”

— David R. Brower

42. “Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste?”

— David R. Brower

43. “For how many people do you think might yet stand on this planet before the sun grows cold? That’s the responsibility we hold in our hands.”

— David R. Brower

44. “There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that’s plutonium.”

— David R. Brower

45. “A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one.”

— David R. Brower

46. “Perhaps we’ll realize that each of us has not one vote but ten thousand or a million.”

— David R. Brower

47. “I believe in the rights of creatures other than man.”

— David R. Brower

48. “We need the sea. We need a place to stand and touch and listen – to feel the pusle of the world as the surf rolls in.”

— David R. Brower

49. “It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.”

— David R. Brower

50. “I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in ’52, walked the plank there in ’69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that.”

— David R. Brower