Quotes from Rachel Carson

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

Those who love and free nature are never alone.

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future.

The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance.

Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.

Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.

Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent... It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to speak out to many thousands of people.

The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.

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

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

Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience.

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

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

Why would anyone believe it is possible to lay down such barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.

If I had influence with the good fairy... I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.

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

The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.

For all at last return to the sea- to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.

Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.