My Quotes Collection

On the world - On wilderness - On life - On ethics - On economics - On history - On activism - On humans - On society - On science - On religion - Jocular - Bumper stickers - Miscellaneous - Norwegian - My own - Back to top - Home

On the world:

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
—Edward Abbey

But it seems that the wind is setting East, and the withering of all Woods may be drawing near.
—J.R.R. Tolkien

An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.
—Aldo Leopold

If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a happier or a better population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.
—John Stuart Mill (1857)

To bear children into this world is like carrying wood to a burning house.
—Peter Wessel Zapffe

To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
—Aldo Leopold

The future was better in the past.
—Unknown

My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose
—J.B.S. Haldane

If you don't change direction, you end up where you are headed.
—John Gibbons

Death is one thing,
an end to birth is something else.
—Soulé and Wilcox 1980

The one process ongoing that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
—Edward O. Wilson

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway.
—Jared Diamond

a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late
—Jessica Atreides, Dune

We should never forget that there is more profit to be made exploiting the environment than in cleaning it up; and on the day the converse becomes true, it will be too late.

The significant problems we are facing can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
—Albert Einstein

Good planets are hard to find.
—unknown

It’s not so much that the road to hell is paved with good intentions as that the road to hell is paved.
—unknown

If you drink from a bottle marked "POISON" it is almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later.
—Alice, in Wonderland

It’s always darkest just before it goes totally black.
—Henrik Ibsen (Peer Gynt)

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
—Albert Einstein

On wilderness:

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.
—Henry David Thoreau

I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
— Aldo Leopold

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity...
— John Muir

Any society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.
—Edward Abbey

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.
— Terry Tempest Williams

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams... as "wild". Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness".
—Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Chief

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity.
—Wallace Stegner

The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth.
—Chief Seattle, 1854

Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money can not be eaten.
—Cree Indian prophesy

Wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher “standard of living” is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque flower is a right as inalienable as free speech. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.
—Aldo Leopold 1949, Sand Country Almanac

A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species...
—John Stuart Mill (1857)

We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out is our own ignorance and folly.
—Thomas Cole (1835)

In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.
—Joseph Wood Krutch 1953

Unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.
—Joseph Wood Krutch

Hunt cows, not bears
—Edward Abbey?

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
—John Steinbeck

We are already fighting World War III and I am sorry to say we are winning. It is the war against the earth.
—Raymond Dasmann

Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work and man can
only mar it.
—Theodore Roosevelt

On life:

I found that by working six weeks a year I could meet all the expenses of living.
—Henry David Thoreau

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.
— Thomas Jefferson

It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn’t realize it.
—Siva Vaidhyanathan

It is naive to think, that this life can be lived if you are not naive
—Kumbel

Little did I know that the days that came and went were life...
—Stig Johanson

The good does not last long...
—Ludvig Holberg

Will the things that are being lost — the wilderness, the plants and animals, the skills, and all the others — leave too vast a gap in the human spirit?
This is the unanswerable question. In the meantime, we must live in our century and wait, enduring somehow the unavoidable sadness.
—David Ehrenfeld (The Arrogance of Humanism)

Remember to stop and smell the flowers.
—Unknown

Life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.
—Jean de la Bruyere

Life is not the days gone by, but the ones you remember.

The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
—Lily Tomlin

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
—Hegel

The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.
—Edward Abbey

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still be alive but you have ceased to live.
—Mark Twain

Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
—Edward Abbey

The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
—John Greenleaf Whittier

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
—John Muir

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
—Mark Twain

On ethics:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
—Aldo Leopold (1949, Sand County Almanac)

...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
—Aldo Leopold, 1933

The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believe themselves to have to deal only with the relation of man to man.
—Albert Schweitzer

Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
—unknown

Good is that which promotes life. Evil is that which destroys it.
—Albert Schweitzer

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.
—Edward Abbey

The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy — it is already too late for that — but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
—Aldo Leopold

On Economics:

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
—Kenneth E. Boulding

Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.
—Kenneth E. Boulding

If people understood how the economic system works, there'd be a revolution in a minute.
—Henry Ford

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
—Edward Abbey

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.
—Paul Samuelson

Society must cease to look upon 'progress' as something desirable. 'Eternal Progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy', but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous.
—Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn

The vast mass of mediocre economists are entrapped in their own unnatural love for a growing gross national product. Growthmania is surely the most pervasive social disease in America... most economists are hooked on growth the way junkies are hooked on heroin.
—Paul Ehrlich

We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.
—George Monbiot

If the climate were a bank, it would already be saved.
—Hugo Chavez

The frontier is no more. Now it is spaceship rules or death.
—David C. Korten

I shall argue that it is the capital stock from which we derive satisfaction, not from the additions to it (production) or the subtractions from it (consumption): that consumption, far from being a desideratum, is a deplorable property of the capital stock which necessitates the equally deplorable activity of production: and that the objective of economic policy should not be to maximize consumption or production, but rather to minimize it, i.e. to enable us to maintain our capital stock with as little consumption or production as possible.
—Kenneth Boulding, 1949

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
—Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

When faced with the unhappy dilemma of choosing between a physical and a political impossibility, it is better to attempt the politically "impossible".
—Daly and Farley, Ecological Economics (2011)

On History:

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.
—Cicero

On activism:

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
— Edward Abbey

You must speak loud to those who are hard of hearing.
— H. D. Thoreau, then Edward Abbey

Resist much, obey little
—Walt Whitman, then Edward Abbey

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a thousand books.
—Edward Abbey

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?
— H. D. Thoreau

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
— Edward Abbey

One man with courage is a majority.
— Thomas Jefferson

Cowards die many times before their actual deaths.
— Julius Caesar

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
— Upton Sinclair (1935)

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
— Thomas Jefferson

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
— Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
— Thomas Jefferson

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
— Thomas Jefferson

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
— Thomas Jefferson

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
— Thomas Jefferson

Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.
—Jimmy Carter

A lifetime is so little a time that we die before we get ready to live.
I should like to study at a college, but then I have to say to myself:
"You will die before you can do anything else".
—John Muir

Be true to the Earth
—Friedrich Nietzsche, then Edward Abbey

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
— Mark Twain

All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self-justifying — a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hours.
—Edward Abbey

‘You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence.…Always cut fence. That’s the law of the hundredth meridian. East of that don’t matter none. Back there it’s all lost anyhow. But west, cut fence’ (Plang!)
—Seldom Seen Smith (The Monkeywrench Gang)

Strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. ...To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself.
— Thomas Jefferson

Life on this planet is being destroyed at an amazing rate because of an entrenched political and economic system which encourages exploitative and wasteful behavior. The means to change an entrenched system cannot be found within that system, and so no amount of political lobbying or private benevolence will be able to halt this system’s destruction.
— John Wade

If voting could change the system, it would be against the law.
—unknown

Now. Or Never.
—H. D. Thoreau

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
—Aldous Huxley

Once you know the truth, you can only close your eyes or fight.
—unknown

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.
—St. Augustin

No one has less to live for than a man who lives only for himself.
—unknown

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
—George Orwell

But, damn it, I am an animal. A living being of flesh and blood, storm and fury. The oceans of the Earth course through my veins, the winds of the sky fill my lungs, the very bedrock of the planet makes my bones. I am alive! I am not a machine, a mindless automaton, a cog in the industrial world, some New Age android. When a chain saw slices into the heartwood of a two- thousand-year-old Coast Redwood, it's slicing into my guts. When a bulldozer rips through the Amazon rain forest, it's ripping into my side. When a Japanese whaler fires an exploding harpoon into a great whale, my heart is blown to smithereens. I am the land, the land is me.
—Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-warrior

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
—Ayn Rand

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.
—Samuel Butler

There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.
—Victor Hugo

Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
— Margaret Mead

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
— Thomas Jefferson

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
— Thomas Jefferson

Don't talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.
— Thomas Jefferson

Every generation needs a new revolution.
— Thomas Jefferson

Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will.
— Frederick Douglass

Gandhi is OK. Neville Chamberlain is not.
—Tormod V. Burkey

We now face the prospect of a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization’s relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction. More and more people of conscience are joining the effort to resist, but the time has come to make this struggle the central organizing principle of world civilizations.
— Al Gore (Earth in the Balance)

If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?
—Robert Moses

Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.
—Winston Churchill

When injustice becomes law, Resistance becomes duty.
—Thomas Jefferson

Hell begins the day that God grants you the vision to see all that you could have done, should have done, and would have done, but did not do.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

We are the ones we have been waiting for.
—David C. Korten

Those who say it cannot be done should not stand in the way of those doing it.
—Chinese Proverb

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried out by bulldozers and chain saws.
— Edward Abbey

Activism is my rent for living on this planet.
— Alice Walker

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt (to political activists)

On humans:

Aus so krummen Holze, als voraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz gerades gezimmert werden.
—Immanuel Kant

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
—Edward Abbey

I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
—Sigmund Freud

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Après Nous, le déluge
—Madame de Pompadour (to Louis XV)

It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object.
—John Stuart Mill (1857)

Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place…
—Isaiah 23, 005:008

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
—Albert Einstein

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.
—Edward Abbey

Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.
—Edward Abbey

The vanity of teaching often tempteth a man to forget he is a blockhead.
—George Saville, first Marquess of Halifax

Just when you've made it idiot proof, someone makes a better idiot
—Chris Beach, The Rock

No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.
—Jane Wagner

The plow has probably done more harm — in the long run — than the sword.
—Edward Abbey

Capitalism sounds good in theory but it just doesn’t work.
—Edward Abbey

Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
—Mark Twain

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
—Mark Twain

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.
—Mark Twain

War is white people sending black people to kill yellow people, to protect the land they stole from the red people.
—George Carlin

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
—John Maynard Keynes

Orgel's Second Rule:
Evolution is cleverer than you are

Everything human is pathetic
—Mark Twain

July 4: Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than on all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is inadequate, the country has grown so...
—Mark Twain

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
—Mark Twain

You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they’ve exhausted all the other possibilities
—Winston Churchill

No one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American public.
—H. L. Mencken

The insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men...
—John Maynard Keynes

On Society:

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
—Mark Twain

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.
—Edward Abbey

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
—John Adams

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
— Thomas Jefferson

Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.
—Edward Abbey

If they can get you asking the wrong question, they don't have to worry about the answers.
—Thomas Pynchon

Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.
— Upton Sinclair (1919)

The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other—instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
—Edward Abbey

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
—Edward Abbey

On science:

What good is a rigorous research agenda, if you don't have a decent planet to put it on?
—David Orr

It affords a violent prejudice against almost every science, that no prudent man, however sure of his principles, dares prophesy concerning any event, or foretell the remote consequences of things.
—David Hume 1741

We have failed to examine our love affair with technology . . .
today's problems are all too often yesterday's solutions.
—Stephen Viederman

Ecology is not only more complex than we think, it is more complex than we CAN think
—Billing

We demand the right to stop to look even at lizards, which are nobody's property.
—J.B.S. Haldane

We often do collect irrelevant data on mechanisms that supposedly "pertain" to a particular theory, although finding them does not prove the theory just as not finding them does not refute it.
—Naomi Cappuccino, 1993

the plural of "anecdote", we may recall, is not data

Truth is the intersection of independent lies
—R. Levins, 1966

Academic disciplines are tools used by administrators to keep thinking people easier to control

Pat answers to complex problems are the hallmark of intellectual mediocrity
—T. Dobzhansky

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
—Mark Twain

The Law of Information:
96.7% of all statistics are made up

The great tragedy of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays

Ignorance provides no protection from the consequences of our actions

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.
Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
—Mark Twain

On religion:

When I fed the poor they called me a Saint, when I asked why they are poor, they called me a Communist.
—Oscar Romero

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
—unknown

The delusion of one man is neurosis; the delusion of many men is religion.
—unknown

I'd rather navigate the seas of uncertainty than be mired in the concrete of dogma.
—Patricia Livingston

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
—Ambrose Bierce

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
— Thomas Jefferson

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
— Thomas Jefferson

The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear.
—Upton Sinclair (1918)

Jocular:

Where are we going?
And why are we in this handbasket?

Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy:
If you have a barrel of sewage and add a teaspoon of fine wine, you get sewage.
But if you have a barrel of fine wine and add a teaspoon of sewage,
you still get sewage

Do unto others, then run.
—Benny Hill

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

Someday we'll look back on all this and plow into a parked car.

Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will whiz on your computer.

This life is a test
Remember this is only a test
Had this been a real life you would have received instructions
about where to go and what to do
This life is a test...

I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.
—George Carlin

Gravity is a myth — the Earth sucks

I have not yet begun to procrastinate...

Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you.

It is much easier to apologize than to ask permission.

Lead me not into temptation, I can find it myself…

Bumper stickers:

We have enough youth, how about a fountain of "smart"?

Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?

Your kid may be an honor student but you're still an idiot

Give me ambiguity or give me something else...

We are Microsoft. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Some people are alive only because it is illegal to kill them.

Forget world peace... Visualize using your turn signal.

Everyone has a right to be stupid. Some just abuse the privilege.

Miscellaneous:

"the tyranny of small decisions"
—A.E. Kahn (1966)

It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.
—Mark Twain

Never trust a man with short legs — brains too near his bottoms.
—Noel Coward

In capitalism, man exploits man. In socialism, it’s exactly the opposite.
—Ben Tucker

This machine has no brain.
Please use your own

Microsoft credo: "Failure is not an option. It's bundled with your software."

The Truth is Out There. So what are you doing Here?!

DNRC MOTTO:
I can please only one person per day.
Today is not your day.
Tomorrow isn't looking good either.

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people
—Mark Twain

We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found of securing that.
—Mark Twain

To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war....I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.
—Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.'
—H.L. Mencken

I always preferred the outdoor life. Hunting, shooting, fishing, getting out there with a gun and slaughtering a few of God's creatures.
—Monty Python

Our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
—unknown

The universe is not only weirder than we think, it is weirder than we can think.
—Werner Heisenberg

There's no problem that can't be ignored if we really put our minds to it.
—Mr. Monty Python

Sometimes you just have to stop and ask: What would the bushmen think?
—Monty Python

Norwegian:

Fremtiden var bedre før

Det er naivt at tro, at dette liv kan leves hvis man ikke er naiv.
—Kumbel

Alla dessa dagar som kom och gick
inte visste jag att de var livet
—Stig Johanson

Du skal ikke tåle så inderlig vel den urett som ikke rammer deg selv
—Arnulf Øverland

Den er sterkest som står mest alene.
—Henrik Ibsen (En folkfiende)

Å føde barn til denne verden er som å bære ved inn i et brennende hus.
—Peter Wessel Zapffe

My own:

A little perspective is a dangerous thing.
—Tormod Vaaland Burkey

If you haven´t grasped it by now you aren´t part of the solution, you´re part of the problem.

People who have children should be environmentalists. And environmentalists should not have children.