Quotes & Sayings About Destroying Nature

That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of 'bread and circuses' can compensate for the damage done-these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence-because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity. — E.F. Schumacher

The diversity of mankind is a basic postulate of our knowledge of human beings. But if mankind is diverse and individuated, then how can anyone propose equality as an ideal? Every year, scholars hold Conferences on Equality and call for greater equality, and no one challenges the basic tenet. But what justification can equality find in the nature of man? If each individual is unique, how else can he be made 'equal' to others than by destroying most of what is human in him and reducing human society to the mindless uniformity of the ant heap? — Murray Rothbard

The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar ... I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless - it was nature destroying its own creation - its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion - was this not madness, was this not unreason? — Pearl S. Buck

By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference. — Richard Russo

In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature. — Roger Caillois

Nature is telling us that if you don't respect the environment then you are living with artificial needs and a consumerism that is destroying the very conditions we need to survive. — Tariq Ramadan

There are millions of animal species but, man is the only animal capable of destroying them all. — Anthony D. Williams

To discover the 'traces of God' in nature does not indeed save us, but it does mane us wise, as tradition says; for we discover in the memory of nature a wisdom of existence and life which mirrors the wisdom of God, and for human civilization it is wise to co-operate with nature and to become integrated in it, instead of exploiting and hence destroying it in the interests of human domination. — Jurgen Moltmann

The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect. — Henry Adams

When we destroy the fertile lands, we destroy our own good life! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

In many ways, women are death's natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women "give birth astride of a grave." Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop. — Caitlin Doughty

This is not just an abstract point. What I mean is that power has a social function. Its role is not just to enforce domination or to create winners and losers: it also organizes communities, societies, marketplaces, and the world. Hobbes explained this well. Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a "common power," they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war," Hobbes wrote, "and such a war as is of every man against every man. — Moises Naim

I think all of us are living in denial of our spiritual nature as we continue to participate in the material world even though we know we're destroying the planet we live on. — Russell Brand

Capitalism and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet ... Climate change has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life. — Evo Morales

My point of view, while extremely cogent, is unpopular ... That the repressive nature of the legalities vis-a-vis drugs are destroying the legal system and corrupting the police system. — Jack Nicholson

The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Human settlements are like living organisms. They must grow, and they will change. But we can decide on the nature of that growth - on the quality and the character of it - and where it ought to go. We don't have to scatter the building blocks of our civic life all over the countryside, destroying our towns and ruining farmland. — James Howard Kunstler

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. — Albert Schweitzer

This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman ... is what ultimately lies behind man's famous "conquest of nature" - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own. — Riane Eisler

The most irrevocable of [natures] laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources
there has to be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law winds up destroying its community to support its own expansion. — Janine Benyus

Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal. — Robert Bellarmine

Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to Nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colours, thereby fostering racial chaos. — Alfred Rosenberg

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events
that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies
and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends. — Alan Watts

Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a "common power," they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war," Hobbes wrote, "and such a war as is of every man against every man."23 — Moises Naim

In addition to declaring and destroying all of its weapons of mass destruction, Iraq must end its support for terrorism. It must cease the persecution of its civilian population. It must stop all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. And it must release or account for all Gulf War personnel, including an American pilot, whose fate is still unknown. By taking these steps, and only by taking these steps, the Iraqi regime has an opportunity to avoid conflict. These steps would also change the nature of the Iraqi regime itself. America hopes the regime will make that choice. — George W. Bush

Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he's destroying is this God he's worshipping. — Hubert Reeves

Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the actual structure of nature, that they act. Yet, it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them. — Roy Rappaport

If you say merit does not matter but miracles or favor matters, you are equally destroying yourself and nation. — Sunday Adelaja

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. — Margaret Atwood

Unfortunately for the existing mature systems in nature, the rapid expansion of the human bubble is destroying them. Unfortunately for us, we can't exist without them any more than a living person can exist without oxygen or a body can exist without a head. In this sense, it is actually a conceptual error to define the environment as the rest of the biosphere save humans, and think of ourselves as apart from it, since we can't exist without it. — Jacob Lund Fisker

It seems important that the social value factor be more generally recognized as a powerful causal agent in its own right and something to be dealt with directly as such. No more critical task can be projected for the 1970s than that of seeking for civilized society a new, elevated set of value guidelines more suited to man's expanded numbers and new powers over nature, a frame of reference for value priorities that will act to secure and conserve our world instead of destroying it. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it ... If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact. — Edward O. Wilson

Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering ... since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When we were monkeys, we were more human because we were at least not destroying the nature those days! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Two or three million years ago, the Earth was a ball of fire, revolving arround it's own axis. It took millions of years to cool under the constant downpour of rain. The Process was slow, imperceptible, but the gradual change - transition - came to pass. Same for generation after generation of evolution on Earth.
Nature never jumps. She works in a leisurely manner, experimenting continuously. The same natural transition can be seen in man. This gradual change, transition, works every where, silently building storms and destroying soloar systems. — Lajos Egri

How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful. — John Muir

Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer-it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us-we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little-a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him-unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent-and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretensions. — Robert Harris

Hatred wants to annihilate, but it annihilates by destroying, by making our awareness dull, by suppressing, by dividing. True Nature does not really annihilate, because something is not wiping out something else--there is no duality. The kind of annihilation that True Nature makes possible is more of a recognition, a precise understanding that Being reveals in us. We have no inner agitation in our attitude; we see and understand whatever impediment is arising, but we do not give it energy in the form of reaction, and thus it becomes still on its own and does not appear. We experience this as a dissolving or a melting, but what is actually happening is that the energy fueling the obstacle disappears, the obstacle loses its dynamism, and it simply stops arising. — A.H. Almaas

Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable inquiries, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy-which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life. — Wendell Berry

What's with all the cheering over the apocalypse, anyway? Oh, yay, we get to kill poor helpless humans."
"The excitement over the apocalypse had nothing to do with humans."
"Could have fooled me."
"Humans are incidental."
"Killing and destroying an entire species is incidental?" I can't help but sound like I'm accusing him (Raffe), even though I know he wasn't part of the plan to wipe us out.
Or at least, I think he wasn't personally involved, but I don't really know that, do I?
"Your people have been doing it to all kinds of species."
"That's not the same."
"Why not? — Susan Ee

If men would understand and appreciate the good efforts that went into creation and how beautiful, good and awesome the creations were at the beginning, they would never think of undermining the Creators effort and integrity by destroying the beauty of nature! God is watching us! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The perfect symmetry between the dismantling of the wall of shame and the end of limitless Nature is invisible only to the rich Western democracies. The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing its peoples to abject poverty. Hence a double tragedy: the former socialist societies think they can solve both their problems by imitating the West; the West thinks it has escaped both problems and believes it has lessons for others even as it leaves the Earth and its people to die. The West thinks it is the sole possessor of the clever trick that will allow it to keep on winning indefinitely, whereas it has perhaps already lost everything. — Anonymous

I look at it this way ... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers ... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse. — George Carlin

Nature creates while destroying, and doesn't care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn't extinguished, as long as death doesn't lose its rights. — Ivan Turgenev

This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes ... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations — Aldo Leopold

Man is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation. Not only is the material environment becoming a permanent menace - pollution and refuse, new illness and absolute destructive capacity - but the human framework is no longer under man's control, thus creating an environment for tomorrow which may well be intolerable. This is a wide-ranging social problem which concerns the entire human family. — Pope Paul VI

The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole. — Rudolf Steiner

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. — John Muir

Anger makes us lash out at others, destroying relationships and revealing our true nature. The history of the human race is largely the history of its anger. — Billy Graham

The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple. — Eugene Delacroix

i just want to be honest about my feelings without destroying everything. — AVA.

Unless a man first finds himself, finds his own essential nature and destiny, and begins from them, all his efforts and achievements will be built only on the sand of personality, and at the first serious shock the whole structure will crumble, perhaps destroying him in its fall. — Rodney Collin

Most people don't realize that when we violate the natural order of things when we pollute the air, when we pollute the water, we are destroying mother nature and that's a violent act. If we don't first and foremost come to some peaceful terms, none of us are going to be able to survive. — Cathy Hughes