Rachel Carson Quotes

“When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, '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 poetry.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“And as life began in the sea, so each of us begins his identical life in a miniature ocean within his mother's womb.”
― Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

“See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life "unseeing." I do that some days...I think it's easier to see when you're a kid. We're not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don't have those long to-do lists you guys have.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“... the most significant event of her intellectual and emotional development arrived the way most transformative things enter out lives—through the back door of the mansion of our plans.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.
—E.B. White”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“As Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“One final note on the biogeographic divisions of the world. The very feature that stunned Buffon and his contemporaries, and eventually led to the revolutionary insights that would define the field of biogeography—the evolutionary distinctiveness of different regions—is now waning in the face of the geographic and ecological advance of one species: our own. Few taxa and regions across the globe have escaped the biotic homogenization caused by humanity. Regional biotas are becoming increasingly similar as a result of two pervasive, anthropogenic activities—extinctions of endemic species and species introductions. In fact, these two homogenizing effects of humanity are interrelated, with species introductions being one of the major causes of extinctions of endemic species.
Recall Gertrude Stein’s lament over the loss in distinctiveness of place—that “there is no there, there.” Tragically, this is becoming the sobering reality for the increasingly homogenized biosphere. While we may not be suffering from the muted, “ Silent Spring ” that Rachel Carson warned us about in 1962, the monotonous cacophony of coquís (frogs native to Puerto Rico) and cicada in exotic lands as isolated as Hawaii now drown out the euphonious, more subtle calls of honeycreepers and other birds native to the islands.”
― Mark V Lomolino, Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction

“The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
—Keats”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“To all of them I express my deepest thanks for time and thought so generously given.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do not use it. We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental agencies but we seldom take their advice.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“In the words of Jean Rostand, "The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring