Last Updated: October 25, 2022 by Quote.cc Team
With the threat of climate change, deforestation, oil spills, air pollution, plastics, or toxic chemicals leaking into our water, it has perhaps never been more important to consider our individual and collective impact on our world. Our planet needs us to step up and take action toward cleaning up many of the messes we have made through irresponsibility.
So a great way of doing that is to use these environment quotes to help remind and inspire you to do your part to save the world. Get motivated to make some changes today with our collection of the best environmental quotes that remind us to keep the Earth, one person at a time.
380 Environmental Quotes
Top 10 Environmental Quotes
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“It’s the little things that citizens do. That’s what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees.” – Wangari Maathai
“Let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” – John F. Kennedy
“Men argue. Nature acts.” – Voltaire
“Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.” – Victoria Principal
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
“Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.” – Stewart Udall
“Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?” – Groucho Marx
“In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.” – Naomi Klein
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” – Dr Seuss
Funny Environmental Quotes
“Discontent is the first necessity of progress.” – Thomas Edison
“If you’re asking when climate change is going to “happen,” you’re really asking when’s it going to happen to “me” because it’s already happened to many other people.” – Eric Roston
“You wouldn’t think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we’ll do it one day. That’s how negligent we are.” – Ian Rankin
“It’s easier to call vegans crazy than it is to question your morality.”
“I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” – Dr. Seuss (From The Lorax)
“Nature provides exceptions to every rule.” – Margaret Fuller
“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” – Marshall McLuhan
“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree long ago.” – Warren Buffett
“People would rather believe than know.” – Edward O. Wilson
“Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Time spent in nature is the most cost-effective and powerful way to counteract the burnout and sort of depression that we feel when we sit in front of a computer all day.” – Richard Louv
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” – Robert Swan
“We are forever responsible for that which we have tamed.” – Antoine de Saint Exupery
“We have the potential to enhance the planet. Trees enhance the planet. People could go further. We could make the Earth sing.” – Michael Reynolds
“The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.” – Herman E. Daly
“The Silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence: it is tense and confirmed.” – Elizabeth Bowen
“Grow food, not lawns.”
“Before the sun is just a bright spot in the nighttime.” – Paul Williams and Roger Nichols
“The earth laughs in flowers.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” – Malcolm X
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Alan Kay
“The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.” – Marlee Matlin
“The trouble is you think you have time.” – Buddha
“Change before you have to.” – Jack Welch
“Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air or drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something.” – Carl Sagen
“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” – Henry David Thoreau
“If we wipe out the fish, the oceans are going to die. If the oceans die, we die. We can’t live on this planet with a dead ocean.” – Paul Watson
“Caring for the Earth is not a hippie thing, it’s a survival thing.”
“Wildness is the preservation of the World.” – Henry David Thoreau
“What’s the difference between a 2 degree world and a 4 degree world? Human civilisation.” – Professor John Schellnhuber
“Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible there is no hope.” – Greta Thunberg
“Every time you buy organic you are persuading more farmers to grow organic.”
“As far as food is concerned, the great extravagance is not caviar or truffles, but beef, pork and poultry.” – Peter Singer
Famous Environmental Quotes
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.” – Arthur C. Clarke
“We as a culture are forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very, very deep connection with nature.” – James Balog
“Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth… these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all.” – Ban Ki-moon
“Green-tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century.” – John Doerr
“Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. We can’t save the world by playing by the rules. The rules have to be changed.” – Greta Thunberg
“It is time for us now as a nation to exercise the same reasonable foresight in dealing with our great natural resources that would be shown by any prudent man in conserving and widely using the property which contains the assurance of well-being for himself and his children.” – President Theodore Roosevelt
“If every building was to consume its own sewerage that’d be huge. Then if every building made its own power, and heated and cooled itself, and caught its own water rather then sucking water out of the aquifers – the ramifications of how people live in their own units could affect things in an unbelievable way. Ultimately it would affect the minds and hearts of people.” – Michael Reynolds
“We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.” – Stephen Hawking
“Beauty will save the world.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Deforestation is changing our climate, harming people and the natural world. We must, and can, reverse this trend.” – Jane Goodall
“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.” – Leo Tolstoy
“The environment and the economy are really both two sides of the same coin. If we cannot sustain the environment, we cannot sustain ourselves.” – Wangari Maathai
“It’s not enough that we do our best. Sometimes we have to do what’s required.” – Winston Churchill
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” – Mark Twain
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller
“If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.” – Barry Commoner
“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – Anne Frank
“We need a national political leader to step forward, an environmental Churchill, to rally the world around this effort.” – Lester R. Brown
“The Earth is a fine place and worth fighting for.” – Ernest Hemingway
“It is important we never be a spectator to unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.” – Christopher Hitchens
“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.” – Helen Keller
Positive Environmental Quotes
“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.” – Jimmy Carter
“We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety, a hundred years at the very most. During that period we must try to do something good, something useful with our lives.” – Dalai Lama
“Try to leave the Earth a better place than when you arrived.” – Sidney Sheldon
“What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology?” – Richard Louv
“Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.” – Muhammad Yunus
“We have met the enemy and he is us.” – Walt Kelly
“Against the ruin of the world, the only defense is the creative act.” – Kenneth Rexroth
“We never know the worth of water until the well is dry.” – Thomas Fuller
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” – Albert Einstein
“First we shape the cities – then they shape us.” – Jan Gehl
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” – -George Bernard Shaw
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” – William James
“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
“It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.” – David Attenborough
“In the United States we spent the last century building our cities around the car, but we damaged our cities in the process and we’re really getting diminishing returns on that investment.” – Janette Sadik-Khan
“The main focus of urban planning has been to keep the cars happy.” – Jan Gehl
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.” – John F. Kennedy
“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.” – Chris Maser
“The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world.” – James Baldwin
“We’re not going to win by changing light globes. We need you to be deeply, politically engaged.” – Bill McKibben
“Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.” – Theodore Levitt
“The single biggest threat to our planet is the destruction of habitat and along the way loss of precious wildlife. We need to reach a balance where people, habitat, and wildlife can co-exist – if we don’t everyone loses … one day.” – Steve Irwin
“On climate change we have to acknowledge that we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so. And the media has failed to create broad public awareness. But Homo sapiens have not yet failed.” – Greta Thunberg
“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.” – Henry David Thoreau
“How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen.” – Victor Hugo
“The mark of a great city isn’t how it treats its special places – everybody does that right – but how it treats its ordinary ones.” – Aaron M. Renn
“Every day, I am torn between the desire to save the world and the desire to savour the world. This makes it very hard to plan the day.” – E.B. White
“Bringing nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl. If cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn’t be touched.” – Stone Gossard
“The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.” – James Kunstler
“Growth is inevitable and desirable, but the destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how.” – Edward T. McMahon
“Streets are where life and history happen, and that places transportation at the cultural, social, and political center of cities.” – Janette Sadik-Khan
“It’s like the gravity of the Earth. There’s a gravity of human nature that makes it hard to think in any other way than the way that’s here.” – Michael Reynolds
“It is difficult to design a place that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.” – William H. Whyte
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” – John Muir
“The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?” – David Attenborough
“The Congress, the Administration and the public all share a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment, and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man.” – President Richard Nixon
“Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, yet we’re destroying the only home we have.” – Jane Goodall
“We are living on the planet as if we have another one to go to.” – Terry Swearingen
“I see my work as an exploration of how to remove stress. That’s not necessarily architecture.” – Michael Reynolds
“With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?” – Yehuda Berg
Environmental Awareness Quotes
“The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve Nature is probably the biggest expression of human pride, but it has deep roots in the past and is almost universal.” – René Dubos
“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.” – T.S. Eliot
“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“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
“Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” – Albert Einstein
“Fast fashion isn’t free. Someone else is paying.” – Lucy Siegle
“The active and abandoned tailings ponds I have photographed, for example, are strangely beautiful – yet they are also chock full of cyanide, which is used in the recovery of microscopic particles of gold from the waste tailings of copper mines.” – David Maisel
“The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat.” – Jacques Cousteau
“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” – African proverb
“Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” – Buddha
“The movement to address climate change is about something deeper than [justice], it’s about solidarity. Human solidarity.” – Bill McKibben
“Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.” – George Washington Carver
“Winning slowly is the same as losing.” – Bill McKibben
“The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we’re ready for it.” – Arnold H. Glasow
“The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn urban forms condition mind.” – Lewis Mumford
“The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.” – Richard Rogers
“If you walk the talk, you don’t have to talk that much.” – Michael Reynolds
“Every time you spend money you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.” – Anna Lappe
“The most important thing about global warming is this. Whether humans are responsible for the bulk of climate change is going to be left to the scientists, but it’s all of our responsibility to leave this planet in better shape for the future generations than we found it.” – Mike Huckabee
“A true conservationist knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.” – John James Audubon
“Everyone has the right to live in a great place. More importantly, everyone has the right to contribute to making the place where they already live great.” – Fred Kent
“If they say it can’t be done, it doesn’t always work out that way.” – Yogi Berra
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” – Rachel Carson
“We have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place – or not bother.” – Jane Goodall
“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.” – Greta Thunberg
“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls while others build windmills.” – Chinese proverb
“Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?” – Walt Disney
“We know most politicians don’t want to talk to us. Good, we don’t want to talk to them either. We want them to talk to the scientists instead.” – Greta Thunberg
“Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?” – Jane Goodall
“The old forests are going and once they are gone we will have to wait a thousand years or more to see their like. Though nothing will be allowed such a generous measure of time to grow.” – Annie Proulx
“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance because they have people in abundance.” – Jane Jacobs
“The great thing about the dilemma we’re in is that we get to re-imagine every single thing we do…There isn’t a single thing that doesn’t require a complete remake. There are two ways of looking at that. One is: Oh my gosh, what a big burden. The other way, which I prefer, is: What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change the world.” – Paul Hawken
“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain, or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” – John Muir
“People may doubt what you say, but they’ll believe what you do.” – Lewis Cass
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy – sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” – Thomas Edison
“A healthy ecology is the basis for a healthy economy.” – Claudine Schneider
“The trouble with the rat race is that, even if you win, you’re still a rat.” – Lily Tomlin
“The earth has music for those who listen.” – William Shakespeare
“We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse – we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.” – Joel Salatin
“Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.” – Naomi Klein
“Preservation of our environment is not a liberal or conservative challenge; it’s common sense.” – President Ronald Reagan
“The mountains are calling and I must go.” – John Muir
“One of the true tests of leadership is the ability to recognise a problem before it becomes an emergency.” – Arnold H Glasow
“Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“If you are fearful of the destruction of the environment, then learn to quit being an environmental parasite.” – Wendell Berry
“Environmentally friendly cars will soon cease to be an option … they will become a necessity.” – Fujio Cho
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” – Henry David Thoreau
“If you really think the environment is less important than the economy try holding your breathe while you count your money.”
“The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.” – Barry Commoner
“The Earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.” – John Paul II
“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” – Vincent Van Gogh
“We need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.” – Bill McKibben
“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese proverb
“To all of you who choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself. Your silence is worst of all.” – Greta Thunberg
“We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us.” – Mary Daly
“Cherish the natural world because you’re part of it and you depend on it.” – David Attenborough
“The future depends on what we do in the present.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
“They can print statistics and count the population in hundreds of thousands, but to each man, a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people.” – Graham Greene
Environmental Sustainability Quotes
“The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.” – Ralph Nader
“By the clock of geology, this climate shift is unfolding at a dizzying, perhaps unprecedented pace, but by time scales relevant to people, it’s happening in slow motion.” – Andrew Revkin
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe
“If you took stress out of people’s lives and made them happy in terms of the way they live – if you made it easy for them to be at peace on this planet – they would bloom. And I think humanity could go to a whole different level.” – Michael Reynolds
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.” – Wendell Berry
“If the Earth was an apartment, we wouldn’t be getting our security deposit back.” – Jim Shubert
“To make the changes we need to make and to reach a safer future, we will need the resources of everybody here — the scientists, the policy makers, and the industrialists — all working together towards a common goal. And that goal is a planet that can continue to support life.” – Dr. Piers Sellers
“We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.” – Barack Obama
“Trees are the answer.”
“Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.” – Carl Sagan from ‘Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium’
“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.” – Dr. Martin Luther King
“Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.” – Barbara Kingsolver
“To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I – or does anyone else – have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?” – Derrick Jensen
“Sustainable development – development that does not destroy or undermine the ecological, economic, or social basis on which continued development depends – is the only viable pathway to a more secure and hopeful future for rich and poor alike.” – Maurice Strong
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” – Jane Jacobs
“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. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.” – Wendell Berry
“The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.” – -Lady Bird Johnson
“If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.” – David Suzuki
“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” – Bill Vaughan
“Everything that you are against works against you. Everything that you are against can be restated in a way that puts you in support of something. When you are able to state what you are for rather than what you are against, you are focusing on the potential for positive change. Once that is in place, you will find whatever you are focusing on expanding.” – Wayne Dyer
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together … all things connect.” – Chief Seattle
“Most people are on the world, not in it – having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them.” – John Muir
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” – Gary Snyder
“If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places” – Fred Kent
“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” – Albert Einstein
“The use of sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession therof.” – Elizabeth I of England
“Man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; [the Lakota] knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.” – Luther Standing Bear
“The situation is hopeless. We must take the next step.” – Pablo Casals
“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
“What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“In Australia you can’t tell where the coal industry ends and the federal government begins.” – Naomi Klein
“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” – H.G. Wells
Environmental Pollution Quotes
“If you invite more cars, you get more cars. If you make more streets better for cars you get more traffic. If you make more bicycle infrastructure you get more bicycles. If you invite people to walk more and use public spaces more, you get more life in the city. You get what you invite.” – Jan Gehl
“Our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy is physics. And we cannot make “deals” with physics.” – Greta Thunberg
“Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.” – Lewis Mumford
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Dan Millman
“People can live in carbon zero homes right now. The technology is here. Allowing it to happen is the problem. Our rules and regulations won’t let us do it.” – Michael Reynolds
“Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance.” – Ban Ki-moon
“World War 2/climate change analogies are inadequate because in World War 2 we only had to fight Nazis, and today we have to fight climate change AND Nazis.” – Eric Roston
“The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.” – Lewis Mumford
“The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” – Gaylord Nelson
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’” – Sylvia Plath
“Any advertisement in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” – Banksy
“The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.” – Norman Cousins
“You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough.” – Wendell Berry
“If we wait for the meek to inherit the earth there won’t be anything left to inherit.” – Bob Hunter
“There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.” – Mother Teresa
“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.” – Paulo Coelho
“An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it’s where even the rich use public transportation” – Enrique Peñalosa
“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.” – David Attenborough
“If you have people walk and bicycle more, you have a more lively, more liveable, more attractive, more safe, more sustainable and more healthy city. What are you waiting for?” – Jan Gehl
“Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.” – Charles Lindbergh
“People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.” – Ha-Joon Chang
“To damage the earth is to damage your children.” – Wendell Berry
“A nation that destroys is soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Our task must be to free ourselves … by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” – Albert Einstein
“The major problems in the world are the result of the differences between the way nature works and the way people think.” – Gregory Bateson
“You have to design your streets for everyone. The cities that have safe streets, that are easy to get around, are the ones that will grow and thrive in the 21st Century.” – Janette Sadik-Khan
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin
“He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Environmental Justice Quotes
“Some people say that we are not doing enough to fight climate change. But that is not true. Because to “not do enough” you have to do something. And the truth is we are basically not doing anything.” – Greta Thunberg
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Dr. Martin Luther King
“I am of the opinion that architecture should exist quietly with nature, never opposing it. I am positive that a choice between these alternatives no longer applies. Architecture and nature should be integrated. Both should be part of our daily life.” – Yasuhiro Yamashita
“We don’t have to sacrifice a strong economy for a healthy environment.” – Dennis Weaver
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” – Abraham Lincoln
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.” – Edward Abbey
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” – Sigmund Freud
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” – Ansel Adams
“Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints!” – Chief Seattle
“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.” – Jacques-Yves Cousteau
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” – Paul Coelho
“You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.” – Wangari Maathai
“Out of adversity comes opportunity.” – Ben Franklin
“What’s bad about sprawl is not its uniformity but that it is uniformly bad.” – James Kunstler
“To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem.” – Douglas P. Wheeler
“My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” – Langston Hughes
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” – Edward Abbey
“City living by its definition is crowded. It is tolerant of other people. It is dependent on a sophisticated population that makes a hundred compromises daily so that they can benefit from the collective energy that a city generates.” – Robert N. Davis
“Time spent among trees is never time wasted.” – Anonymous
“Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.” – Sylvia Earle
“For cities to be livable people need to have freedom of choice in terms of mobility. According to what your daily needs are, you can walk, you can bicycle, you can take public transport.” – Helle Søholt
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Albert Einstein
“We can easily make cities where you don’t need individual cars for each individual’s transportation.” – Jan Gehl
“I am a conservative. You can’t get more conservative than being a conservationist. Our entire raison d’etre is to conserve and protect.” – Paul Watson
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.” – Mohandas K. Gandhi
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage
“I don’t really consider climate change a political issue, I consider it to be a moral issue.” – Al Gore
“I always wondered why somebody doesn’t do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.” – Lily Tomlin
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
“Riding a bicycle is the summit of human endeavour – an almost neutral environmental effect coupled with the ability to travel substantial distances without disturbing anybody. The bike is the perfect marriage of technology and human energy.” – Jeremy Corbyn
“If we do not change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.” – Chinese proverb
“Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” – John F Kennedy
“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.” – Aldo Leopold
“Global warming isn’t real because I was cold today! Also great news: world hunger is over because I just ate.” – Stephen Colbert
“To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.” – Murray Bookchin
“I love not Man the less, but Nature more.” – Lord Byron
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol
“He that plants trees loves others besides himself.” – Thomas Fuller
“This we know; The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know, all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.” – Chief Seattle
“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
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” – John Muir
“For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports.” – Sandra Postel
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.” – Baba Dioum
“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.” – Lyndon B. Johnson
“How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don’t want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.” – John Maeda
“Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination.” – Paul Goldberger
“We live in a culture where people are more offended by ‘swear’ words and middle fingers than they are by famine, warfare and the destruction of our environment.”
“The scale of our homes should be derived from the real needs of our daily lives, not from vanity, insecurity, or a need for public display. Home should be the setting for life, not the measure of it.” – James Gauer
“If you demolish the whole city for the flow of traffic, what destination for that traffic would be left?” – Marc van Woudenberg
“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist.” – David Attenborough
“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.” – President Joseph R. Biden
“Every day I supply oxygen for up to 4 people. Don’t you think I’m worth saving?” – A tree
“You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.” – Joel Salatin
“To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.” – Wendell Berry
“High quality water is more than the dream of the conservationists, more than a political slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity at the right place at the right time, is essential to health, recreation, and economic growth.” – Edmund S. Muskie
“Going back to a simpler life is not a step backward.” – Yvon Chouinard
“The Earth is what we all have in common.” – Wendell Berry
“Good stewardship of the environment is not just a personal responsibility, it is a public value… Our duty is to use the land well, and sometimes not to use it at all. This is our responsibility as citizens, but more than that, it is our calling as stewards of the earth.” – President George W. Bush
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu
“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.” – Margaret Atwood
Environmental Health Quotes
“Every moment is a new beginning.” – T.S. Eliot
“If solutions within this system are so impossible to find then maybe we should change the system itself.” – Greta Thunberg
“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” – Henry David Thoreau
“If you want to become an instrument of change, gather people in your community and host a regular conversation. The only way to succeed is to connect people, share inspiration and support one another.” – Deepak Chopra
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it.” – Richard Louv
“The modern city is probably the most unlovely and artificial site this planet affords. The ultimate solution is to abandon it. We shall solve the City Problem by leaving the city.” – Henry Ford
“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” – Wendell Berry
“Action is the antidote to despair.” – Edward Abbey
“The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds.” – Dalai Lama
“We can never have enough of Nature.” – Henry David Thoreau
“The world will be saved by the Western woman.” – The Dalai Lama
“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.” – John Ruskin
“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” – Carl Sagan
“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” – John Wooden
“Eat food. Not much. Mostly plants.” – Michael Pollan
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” – Carl Sagan
“The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed,” – Mahatma Gandhi
“I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.” – John Muir
“No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is still a car. An electric car is still a car. An e-hail car is still a car. All the techie fairy dust in the world can’t turn cars into the liberators of all the street space they dominate.” – Janette Sadik-Khan
“Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge.” – Thomas Edison
“At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world if we are not paying attention to it ― if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature give us for free: clean air, clean water, breathtaking vistas, mountains for skiing, rivers for fishing, oceans for sailing, sunsets for poets, and landscapes for painters. What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can’t see anything green during the day? Just because we can’t sell shares in nature doesn’t mean it has no value.” – Thomas L. Friedman
“Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers” – Peter Singer
“We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.” – Barbara Ward
“Journey with me to a true commitment to our environment. Journey with me to the serenity of leaving to our children a planet in equilibrium.” – Paul Tsongas
“Nothing beautiful without struggle.” – Plato
“Raising awareness on the most pressing environmental issues of our time is more important than ever.” – Leonardo DiCaprio
“All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.” – Marie Curie
“It’s surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us but for all life on Earth.” – David Attenborough
“Our streets for too long have just been looked at as a place to move cars as fast as possible, from point A to point B, or to just serve as parking lots. And these cars basically sit on the side of the road unused 98 percent of the time. That’s not a really good use of one of the most precious resources a city has: its streets.” – Janette Sadik-Khan
“God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.” – John Muir
Environmental Education Quotes
“But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its’ usefulness will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“ … because when you stop and look around, this life is pretty amazing.”
“Biking is not alternative transportation. It’s basic transportation.” – Janette Sadik-Khan
“There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.” – Herman E. Daly
“The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.” – David Attenborough
“We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” – Immanuel Kant
“Where bikes are perceived as a nuisance it’s often just a symptom of outdated street designs.” – Janette Sadik-Khan
“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.” – Albert Einstein
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” – Maya Angelou
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” – William Shakespeare
“All must pay the debt of nature.” – Annie Proulx
“A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.” – E. O. Wilson
“It is our collective and individual responsibility … to preserve and tend to the world in which we all live.” – Dalai Lama
“If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in Water.” – Loren Eiseley
“I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.” – Mother Teresa
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.” – John Keats
“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little. Do what you can.” – Sydney Smith
“I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.” – R. Buckminster Fuller
“The cure for anything is saltwater – sweat, tears, or the sea.” – Isak Dinesen
“Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom – and lakes die.” – Gil Scott-Heron
“Stop fighting about who created the world and start fighting against the people who are trying to destroy it!”
“We don’t have to sacrifice a strong economy for a healthy environment.” – Dennis Weaver
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.” – American Indian proverb
“A protected bicycle lane in a city in a developing country is a powerful symbol, showing that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is as important as one in a $30,000 car.” – Enrique Peñalosa
“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, the last river is polluted and when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.” – Alanis Obomsawin
“No one will protect what they don’t care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced.” – David Attenborough
“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
“The first rule of holes is that when you are in one, stop digging.” – Bill McKibben
“Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“What after all has maintained the human race on this old globe, despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not the faith in new possibilities and the courage to advocate them.” – Jane Addams
“We know the majority of the world’s population are going to live in dense cities. There will simply not be room for all of us to have a car.” – Jan Gehl
“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.” – Vandana Shiva
“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.” – Rachel Carson
“An environment-based education will help students realize that school isn’t supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.” – Richard Louv
“Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means “to draw out.” What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us ‘open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated planet.’ The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.” – David Orr
“Sooner or later, we will have to recognise that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.” – Evo Morales
“We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.” – Margaret Mead
“You can’t divorce civilization from nature – we totally depend on it.” – James Balog
“We spend more time developing means of escaping our troubles than we do solving the troubles we’re trying to escape from.” – David Lloyd
“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy … And to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. We scientists don’t know how to do that.” – Gus Speth
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” – Will Rogers
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller
“The second mode [to deal with unsafe cities] is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.” – Jane Jacobs
“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela
“Earth is what we all have in common.” – Wendell Berry
“I have never moved away from my mainstay – trying to address all the environmental issues that come to me. I consult with law firms in the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Italy, Greece, and India to begin to address environmental disasters. I do motivational speaking.” – Erin Brockovich
“If it is wrong to wreck the planet, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage.” – Bill McKibben
“Let the clean air blow the cobwebs from your body. Air is medicine.” – Lillian Russell
“The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating.” – William H. Stewart
“No matter how many toys we amass we leave them behind when we die, just as we leave a broken environment, an economy that only benefits the richest, and a legacy of empowering greed over goodness. It is now time to commit to following a new path.” – John Perkins
“When we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.”
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make-believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” – Aldo Leopold
“The main solution is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop the emission of greenhouse gases.” – Greta Thunberg
“With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.” – Sylvia Earle
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – Dr. Seuss
“We used to build civilisation. Now we build shopping malls.” – Bill Bryson
