Top 140 Rachel Carson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Nowhere on the shore is the relation of a creature to its surroundings a matter of a single cause and effect; each living thing is bound to its world by many threads, weaving the intricate design of the fabric of life.”

— Rachel Carson

52. “The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”

— Rachel Carson

53. “Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.”

— Rachel Carson

54. “This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.”

— Rachel Carson

55. “The Choice, after all, is ours to make.”

— Rachel Carson

56. “In the fish world many things are told by sound waves.”

— Rachel Carson

57. “Only as a child’s awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.”

— Rachel Carson

58. “Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.”

— Rachel Carson

59. “For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.”

— Rachel Carson

60. “It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.”

— Rachel Carson

61. “Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.”

— Rachel Carson

62. “We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.”

— Rachel Carson

63. “We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?”

— Rachel Carson

64. “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.”

— Rachel Carson

65. “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.”

— Rachel Carson

66. “The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.”

— Rachel Carson

67. “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.”

— Rachel Carson

68. “When any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end as natural. When that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.”

— Rachel Carson

69. “Nature reserves some of her choice rewards for days when her mood may appear to be somber.”

— Rachel Carson

70. “As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”

— Rachel Carson

71. “Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”

— Rachel Carson

72. “Darling – I suppose the world would consider us absolutely crazy, but it is wonderful to feel that way, isn’t it? Sort of a perpetual springtime in our hearts.”

— Rachel Carson

73. “The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.”

— Rachel Carson

74. “There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life – we are never bored.”

— Rachel Carson

75. “Carson’s thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution.”

— Rachel Carson

76. “Such plants are “weeds” only to those who make a business of selling and applying chemicals.”

— Rachel Carson

77. “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

78. “Many children... delight in the small and inconspicuous.”

— Rachel Carson

79. “We must change our philosophy, abandon our attitude of human superiority and admit that in many cases in natural environments we find ways and means of limiting populations of organisms in a more economical way than we can do it ourselves.”

— Rachel Carson

80. “I still feel there is a case to be made for my old belief that as man approaches the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ – or the space-age universe, if you will, he must do so with humility rather than with arrogance.”

— Rachel Carson

81. “If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”

— Rachel Carson

82. “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

— Rachel Carson

83. “The ultimate answer is to use less toxic chemicals so that the public hazard from their misuse is greatly reduced.”

— Rachel Carson

84. “We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.”

— Rachel Carson

85. “Beauty – and all the values that derive from beauty – are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar.”

— Rachel Carson

86. “Carson’s writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness. It.”

— Rachel Carson

87. “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

88. “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.”

— Rachel Carson

89. “And as life began in the sea, so each of us begins his identical life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb.”

— Rachel Carson

90. “It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons.”

— Rachel Carson

91. “The Eskimos began to make troublesome raids...”

— Rachel Carson

92. “The question of chemical residues on the food we eat is a hotly debated issue. The existence of such residues is either played down by the industry as unimportant or is flatly denied. Simultaneously, there is a strong tendency to brand as fanatics or cultists all who are so perverse as to demand that their food be free of insect poisons. In all this cloud of controversy, what are the actual facts?”

— Rachel Carson

93. “Autumn comes to the sea with a fresh blaze of phosphorescence, when every wave crest is aflame. Here and there the whole surface may glow with sheets of cold fire, while below schools of fish pour through the water like molten metal.”

— Rachel Carson

94. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

— Rachel Carson

95. “Our attitude towards plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith.”

— Rachel Carson

96. “If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

— Rachel Carson

97. “It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.”

— Rachel Carson

98. “One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space.”

— Rachel Carson

99. “The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water.”

— Rachel Carson

100. “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.”

— Rachel Carson