Human Impact Quotes

“But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the thing it looks upon to bless.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley

“The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley

“The flowers must have been the latest generation of perennials, whose ancestors were first planted by a woman who lived in the ruins when the ruins were a raw, unpainted house inhabited by herself and a smoky, serious husband and perhaps a pair or silent, serious daughters, and the flowers were an act of resistance against the raw, bare lot with its raw house sticking up from the raw earth like an act of sheer, inevitable, necessary madness because human beings have to live somewhere and in something and here is just as outrageous as there because in either place (in any place) it seems like an interruption, an intrusion on something that, no matter how many times she read in her Bible, Let them have dominion, seemed marred, dispelled, vanquished once people arrived with their catastrophic voices and saws and plows and began to sing and hammer and carve and erect. So the flowers were maybe a balm or, if not a balm, some sort of gesture signifying the balm she would apply were it in her power to offer redress.”
― Paul Harding

“The thunder of the breakers was tremendous down here, bigger than the world. Like standing inside a thunderstorm. And if we were the last people on earth, so what? This would go on as long as there was a moon to pull the water.”
― Stephen King, Night Shift

“I'll stand by my usual tactics here and say that it doesn't matter whether this sort of pantheism, or any sort of pantheism, is "true." What matters is the way any given mythology prompts us to interact with the world we're part of—the world each of our actions helps to make and unmake. And frankly, some mythologies prompt us to act better than others.”
― Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race

“The sun was out, but it had recently rained, and clusters of black and red and blue butterflies hovered over the puddles. Occasionally, a truck rumbled by, loaded down with logs. The butterflies couldn't scatter fast enough, so the road was littered with severed wings”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History