c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me.
— Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.
— Gabriel García Márquez
I go back to Oberlin in the dead of winter to give a "convocation speech" in Finney Chapel, the largest and most historic of campus structures. In a subconscious nod to my college experience I forget to pack both tights and underwear and have to spend the weekend going commando in a wool skirt and knee socks. I am toured around the school like a stranger by a girl who didn't even go here. We stop at a glossy new cafe for tea and scones. She asks if I want a tour of the dormitories- no, I just want to wander around alone and maybe cry.
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Aegean Islands 1940-41Where white stares, smokes or breaks,Thread white, white of plaster and of foam,Where sea like a wall falls;Ribbed, lionish coast,The stony islands which blow into my mindMore often than I imagine my grassy home;To sun one's bones beside theExplosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea(The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam,Familiar of famous and deserted harbours,Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars.)To know the gear and skill of sailing,The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses,Stories of Turks and smoky ikons,Cry of the bagpipe, treadingOf the peasant dancers;The dark breadThe island wine and the sweet dishes;All these were elements in a happinessMore distant now than any date like '40,A. D. or B. C., ever can express.
— Bernard Spencer
When the north wind blew across the tar ponds, voices were carried away.
— Jonathan Campbell
I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won't stay flat. They've got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been restitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can't imagine any new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn't the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Woman lost (skin deep) like a damn fine thread in the fireWoman of the world caught up in your black machinationsI was a woman who cried alone at night, who gave it all away when she saw the good heart of the man insideWoman caught standing up; her open parts are broken -
— Abigail George, Feeding The Beasts
...as if in rebellion, certain emotions become amplified at the exact moments when you are expected not to feel them at all.
— Chinelo Okparanta, Happiness, Like Water
The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.
— Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
What are days for?Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over.They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the doctor In their long coatsRunning over the fields.
— Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
Evangelicals have squandered their cultural capital because they have tried to reclaim a standing in American culture that they never had. The American Founding was a mix of fragmented religious (and not-so-religious) voices.
— Joseph LaConte
It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.
— Salman Rushdie
Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife's death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. "Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
I've always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me "You're still awake! Hiiii." And I'd think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that.
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Sometimes the best vacation is simply closing your eyes for several minutes and recalling wonderful memories.
— Jett
Nostalgia was never what it used to be.
— Brian Spellman
I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
I was born in the age of "alas".
— Pat Conroy, South of Broad
There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.
— Ray Bradbury
That was the danger of nostalgia, Drizzt realized. One often remembered the good of the past while forgetting the troubles.
— R.A. Salvatore, Passage to Dawn
Every cure for nostalgia is obsolete.
— Raheel Farooq
Nostalgia is best cured via horse whipping.
— stephanie   roberts
A list of things you might not hear: eylash opening on the pillow, the appearance of a star, a leaf leaving a tree, a hand in your hair, a lie being withheld, a tear's journey from eye to shoe, air becoming blue, longing.
— Martine Murray, How To Make A Bird
Peter is suffering from an attack of nostalgia, she knows the symptoms. She mustn't join in otherwise she'll be swept away too, drowning in a quicksand of the past.
— Elly Griffiths, The Crossing Places
Nostalgia for the 20th century brain helps nobody.
— Douglas Coupland
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.
— Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons
Because nobody knows you better than somebody who knew you way back then.
— Claire Cook, Time Flies
It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Preparing to go to school was like getting ready for extended deep sea diving.
— Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash
So before we end and then beginWe'll drink a toast to how it's beenA few more hours to be completeA few more nights on satin sheetsA few more times that I can sayI've loved these days
— Billy Joel, Billy Joel: Turnstiles
She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Michael [Hutchence] is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice—all of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room.
— Lori Majewski, Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s
Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water).
— Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur
Long gone was the cheery welcome of the seaside hotelier, replaced by a weary nostalgia for the good old days.
— Alan Gibbons, The Dark Beneath
Anthony imagined a time before all that - a time when people sipped Earl Grey tea on a breeze cooled veranda and looked out upon endless countryside.
— Alan Gibbons, The Dark Beneath
Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
— Jorge Luis Borges
I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.
— David Bailey
It's just odd being a guest at the wedding. When you dreamed about it for so long, even if you we're a different person, and it was years ago. Sounds so stupid. I was stupid.
— Harriet Evans, Happily Ever After
Dachux: It’s not like in the old days where you could kill a hogre or two, and nobody asked questions.
— C.D. Sutherland, The Dragoneers
Apocalyptic saucer cults have started to spring up all over America. One small group, which has been receiving messages from outer space via Lake City housewife Mrs. Marian Keech, becomes the subject of a research team led by psychologist Leon Festinger. According to an alien entity named Sananda, the end of the world is due any day and under the most cataclysmic of circumstances. The group meets regularly to discuss the latest predictions from Sananda and the rest of the Space Brothers, all relayed to them by Mrs. Keech. Some members bake cakes in the shape of flying saucers to be consumed during their gatherings while local college football scores are closely debated.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
Television hols up a mirror to the true nature of family life today. For the first time people see themselves reflected and refracted within its curved glass screen: helping them to define who the are and how they should behave. The introduction of the TV dinner and the TV tray means that families can now watch themselves while they eat. Behavior patterns start to undergo a radical alteration even as they are being affirmed
—  a rescheduling of life in the suburban living room has taken place.
Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
The public's abiding fascination with flaying saucers, C.G. Jung suggests, 'may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such times eyes turn heavenwards in search of help, and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught between the hardware of scientific detail and the extreme fantasies of contact.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only way to force the evolutionary curve to bend your way is by throwing larger numbers at it.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
We will never understand our world until we have come to terms with its future: it is the age in which we live. The Cold War depended upon internal division in order to maintain itself. Behind its various feints, games and strategies lay a perception of behavior as a form of enforced conformity. People would only do what they were prompted to do. This was the thinking that held the lonely crowd together, briefly connecting the forward thrust of material progress with the broader evolutionary curve.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time.
— Ken Hollings, Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America
She, who had never liked weddings, had allowed herself this fantasy. Her wedding day to Rory. A pretty church in Sussex, festooned with spring flowers. Rows of relatives, and her, Elle, floating down the aisle in cream silk to 'The arrival of queen Sheba', with eyes only for him... Rory, slightly rumpled, slightly scared, her love, her only one.But that wasn't how it had turned out. She knew she was OK, watching him, in fact she was happy for him, happy for Libby. But she couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy for the girl she'd been, who'd loved him so much. She was still dreaming somewhere, hoping this day would come.
— Harriet Evans, Happily Ever After
The rival ideologies of the left and right are both pining for the 50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.
— Brink Lindsey
That night I looked up at those same stars, but I didn't want any of those things. I didn't want Egypt, or France, or far-flung destinations. I just wanted to go back to my life from my childhood, just to visit it, and touch it, and to convince myself that yes, it had been real.
— Jenny  Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir
I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
We do not disappear without a trace. We leave a wake that never quite disappears, a gash in time that we so laboriously leave behind us.
— Lars Saabye Christensen, The Half Brother
Despite your best efforts and intentions, there's a limited reservoir to fellowship before you begin to rely solely on the vapors of nostalgia. Eventually, you move on, latch on to another group of friends. Once in a while, though, you remember something, a remark or a gesture, and it takes you back. You think how close all of you were, the laughs and commiserations, the fondness and affection and support. You recall the parties, the trips, the dinners and late, late nights. Even the arguments and small betrayals have a revisionist charm in retrospect. You're astonished and enlivened by the memories. You wonder why and how it ever stopped. You have the urge to pick up the phone, fire off an email, suggesting reunion, resumption, and you start to act, but then don't, because it would be awkward talking after such a long lag, and, really, what would be the point? Your lives are different now. Whatever was there before is gone. And it saddens you, it makes you feel old and vanquished--not only over this group that disbanded, but also over all the others before and after it, the friends you had in grade and high school, in college, in your twenties and thirties, your kinship to them (never mind to all your old lovers) ephemeral and, quite possibly, illusory to begin with.
— Don Lee, The Collective
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow against the blue sky.
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia
And she had been in love enough times to rule out the possibility that this was merely some feat of nostalgia.
— Galt Niederhoffer, The Romantics
….For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I find myself pounding my fist on the dashboard, screaming, “Pearl JAM! Pearl JAM! Now this is rock and roll! Jeremy’s SPO-ken! But he’s still al-LIIIIIVE!
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is no longer there.
— Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears
The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.
— Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight
how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
And before me the empty table at the Theater Café with my reservation - Barnum Nilsen, 8PM - the only table no one sits at. And this too is an echo, an echo of time, the shadows of a discus spinning through blinding sunlight.
— Lars Saabye Christensen, The Half Brother
Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.
— Joe Abercrombie, Red Country
I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was everything. I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where I used to walk.
— Scott Spencer, Endless Love
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Ludwik Szatera was a passionate lover of nostalgia. He could never come to terms with the eternal passage of men, objects and events. Each moment inexorably turning into the past was to him precious, invaluable, and he witnessed its passing with a sense of inexpressible regret.
— Stefan Grabiński, In Sarah's House
She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.
— George Orwell
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
— Ian McEwan, Enduring Love
1980's: not a time period but a state of mind.
— Carrie Vaughn
nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation forWeak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one’s home universe, or as a longing for versions of one’s self that one will never, and can never know.
— Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
— Vladimir Nabokov
I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so wrapped up in someone that I saw only him, caring not a jot what onlookers might think. I ached with nostalgia for a younger, more responsive me, who seemed to feel things more intensely.
— Catherine Sanderson, Petite Anglaise
I see the old even as I am looking at the new--the storefronts now occupied by up-to-date boutiques and trendy retail shops. It's almost like being in two places at the same time.
— Mary Lois Timbes
It should not be a surprise, even if it is not expected, if a shadow dances among the leaves, a face appears (or seems to), even a community of phantoms from the past. Here you will find answers, questions, and a host of stories.
— Mary Lois Timbes
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
— George Carlin
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park / Congo
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
All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
— Kathryn Stockett, The Help
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
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit
— David Suzuki
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 Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
[Jellyfish] are 97% water or something, so how much are they doing? Just give them another 3% and make them water. It's more useful.
— Karl Pilkington
Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.
— Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
— Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village
People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
— Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
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, The Greenpeace Story
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.
— Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.
— Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
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, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America
If we take all this actions and if it turns out not be true, we have reduced pollution and have better ways to live, the downside is very small. The other way around, and we don’t act, and it turns out to be true, then we have betrayed future generations and we don’t have the right to do that.
— Tony Blair
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
I love it when people yell at me about the environment and then I tell 'em I'm burning 90% cleaner than them.
— Neil Young
As far as food is concerned, the great extravagance is not caviar or truffles, but beef, pork and poultry. Some 38 percent of the world's grain crop is now fed to animals, as well as large quantities of soybeans. There are three times as many domestic animals on this planet as there are human beings. The combined weight of the world's 1.28 billion cattle alone exceeds that of the human population. While we look darkly at the number of babies being born in poorer parts of the world, we ignore the over-population of farm animals, to which we ourselves contribute...[t]hat, however, is only part of the damage done by the animals we deliberately breed. The energy intensive factory farming methods of the industrialised nations are responsible for the consumption of huge amounts of fossil fuels. Chemical fertilizers, used to grow the feed crops for cattle in feedlots and pigs and chickens kept indoors in sheds, produce nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Then there is the loss of forests. Everywhere, forest-dwellers, both human and non-human, can be pushed out. Since 1960, 25 percent of the forests of Central America have been cleared for cattle. Once cleared, the poor soils will support grazing for a few years; then the graziers must move on. Shrub takes over the abandoned pasture, but the forest does not return. When the forests are cleared so the cattle can graze, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Finally, the world's cattle are thought to produce about 20 percent of the methane released into the atmosphere, and methane traps twenty-five times as much heat from the sun as carbon dioxide. Factory farm manure also produces methane because, unlike manured dropped naturally in the fields, it dies not decompose in the presence of oxygen. All of this amounts to a compelling reason...for a plant based diet.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess.
— Art Buchwald
Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.
— Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
Put on a sweater.
— Jimmy Carter
A 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, Oath of Fealty
We line up and make a lot of noise about big environmental problems like incinerators, waste dumps, acid rain, global warming and pollution. But we don't understand that when we add up all the tiny environmental problems each of us creates, we end up with those big environmental dilemmas. Humans are content to blame someone else, like government or corporations, for the messes we create, and yet we each continue doing the same things, day in and day out, that have created the problems. Sure, corporations create pollution. If they do, don't buy their products. If you have to buy their products (gasoline for example), keep it to a minimum. Sure, municipal waste incinerators pollute the air. Stop throwing trash away. Minimize your production of waste. Recycle. Buy food in bulk and avoid packaging waste. Simplify. Turn off your TV. Grow your own food. Make compost. Plant a garden. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If you don't, who will?
— Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure
A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end.... They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from doing what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough.
— Robin Hobb, Shaman's Crossing
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.
— Gil Scott-Heron
There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.
— Herman E. Daly
We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism. Today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see and nobody calls the cops.
— Paul Brooks
Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.
— Sidney Poitier, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography
I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them...“When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
When viewed at the next quantum level of perspective, from which the Earth is seen as an organism and humans are seen as microorganisms, the human species looks like a menace to the planet. In fact, the human race is looking a lot like a disease -- comprised of organisms excessively multiplying, mindlessly consuming, and generating waste with little regard for the health and well-being of its host -- planet Earth.
— Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure
Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature-the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.
— Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
An apple a day might have kept the doctor away prior to the industrialization of food growing andpreparation. But, according to research compiled by the United States Drug Administration (USDA) today’s apple contains residue of eleven different neurotoxins—azinphos, methyl chloripyrifos, diazinon, dimethoate, ethion, omthoate, parathion, parathion methyl, phosalone, and phosmet — and the USDA was testing for only one category of chemicals known as organophosphate insecticides. That doesn’t sound too appetizing does it? The average apple is sprayed with pesticides seventeen times before it is harvested.
— Michelle Schoffro Cook, The Brain Wash: A Powerful, All-Naural Program to Protect Your Brain Against Alzheimer's, Depression, Parkinson's and Other Brain Diseases
Each food items in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles....If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.
— Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
— Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.
— Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
Even viewed conservatively, trees are worth far more than they cost toplant and maintain. The U.S. Forest Service's Center for Urban ForestResearch found a ten-degree difference between the cool of a shadedpark in Tucson and the open Sonoran desert. A tree planted in theright place, the center estimates, reduces the demand for airconditioning and can save 100 kilowatt hours in annual electrical use,about 2 to 8 percent of total use. Strategically planted trees canalso shelter homes from wind, and in cold weather they can reduceheating fuel costs by 10 to 12 percent. A million strategicallyplanted trees, the center figures, can save $10 million in energycosts. And trees increase property values, as much as 1 percent foreach mature tree. These savings are offset somewhat by the cost ofplanting and maintaining trees, but on balance, if we had to pay forthe services that trees provide, we couldn't afford them. Becausetrees offer their services in silence, and for free, we take them forgranted.
— Jim Robbins, The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet
Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth's climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let's undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a "grassroots" group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the days of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch the infotoxins spread - and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come.
— Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: How To Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge - And Why We Must
Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.
— Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship. This culture doesn't just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it's long past time for us to recognize the pattern.
— Aric McBay, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
Economy and environment are the same thing. That is the rule of nature.
— Mollie Beattie
This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living thing.
— Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
Our ancestors have much to answer for.Why? What did they do?....Long ago, they used machines and drugs to keep the unhealthy and unfit ones of us alive. In that past time it was believed that all persons must have children. It was a right deemed so precious that it was forced upon even those who did not value it or should not have had it. If one of our people became pregnant, our people used all their knowledge to assure the young would be born, no matter how sick or disabled. Then, if the young lived, they injected them and dosed them and radiated them and transfused and transplanted them, to keep them alive, and then, when they were grown, they used all their skills in assisting them to have children of their own.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Family Tree
In the Gaia theory air, water, and soil are major components of one central organism, planet Earth. What we typically think of as life - the plants and animals that inhabit the earth - has evolved merely to regulate the chemistry of the biosphere. Humans are insignificant participants, far less important to the life cycle than termites. Even the imbalance that we have created by adding massive quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere may be brought back to acceptable levels by other organisms functioning in their capacity to correct excesses.
— David Easton, The Rammed Earth House
Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.
— Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.
— Theodore Roosevelt
The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.
— George Monbiot
In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.
— Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness
If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order?We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails.
— Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story