Ehrlich Quotes & Sayings

Every footstep we take, every action has a consequence. We breathe in weather, but we breathe out CO2. We're responsible for weather and for climate. — Gretel Ehrlich

The little things become big things over time, but it takes an intelligent consistency to hang in there long enough to reap the fruits of what you have sown. — Richard Ehrlich

We may regard the cell quite apart from its familiar morphological aspects, and contemplate its constitution from the purely chemical standpoint. We are obliged to adopt the view, that the protoplasm is equipped with certain atomic groups, whose function especially consists in fixing to themselves food-stuffs, of importance to the cell-life. Adopting the nomenclature of organic chemistry, these groups may be designated side-chains. We may assume that the protoplasm consists of a special executive centre (Leistungs-centrum) in connection with which are nutritive side-chains... The relationship of the corresponding groups, i.e., those of the food-stuff, and those of the cell, must be specific. They must be adapted to one another, as, e.g., male and female screw (Pasteur), or as lock and key (E. Fischer). — Paul R. Ehrlich

Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love. — Saul Bellow

Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move. — Brenna Ehrlich

I thought if the climate was heating that CO2 was the only forcing, and it would be late in the century before we had trouble. Now that we know about the other half of the forcing, it's obvious that the trouble is coming much sooner. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start. — Gretel Ehrlich

There are a lot of signs. One of the things that makes me most nervous is the disappearance of the frogs. They're going downhill all over the planet. Frogs are susceptible to all kinds of problems, because they require water to breed and their skin is very porous. Their condition is nerve racking. — Paul R. Ehrlich

If anything is endemic to Wyoming it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage. — Gretel Ehrlich

In 2007, I received a National Geographic Expeditions Council grant to go around the top of the world and talk to Arctic people about how they've been impacted by climate change. — Gretel Ehrlich

As fog moved to the mainland I heard a flock of birds fly over. They sounded like a dress rustling, a dress being unfastened and dropping to the floor. Fog came unpinned like hair. On the beach cliffs, great colonies of datura - jimson weed - with their white trumpet flowers, looked like brass bands. — Gretel Ehrlich

According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where "survivors envy the dead," which seems true only when I look at Twitter. Yet — Chuck Klosterman

Politics is a contest among people of diverse backgrounds and philosophies, advocating different solutions to common problems. The system only works when principled, energetic people participate. — Bob Ehrlich

Some of the most important conversations I've ever had occurred at my family's dinner table. — Bob Ehrlich

Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism ... of sexism ... of religious intolerance ... of war ... of gross economic inequality But if you don't solve the population problem, you're not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you're interested in, you're not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control. — Paul R. Ehrlich

For example, I'm a great fan of pornography, but I don't see any reason not to restrict it so that people walking down the street who hate pornography don't have full color pictures outside of movie theaters. Let them be in a different district. I'm kidding about pornography, but you get the point. — Paul R. Ehrlich

After The Bomb we developed a fairly good system for moving food around and have avoided the kind of massive famines that attract the media. Although of course we've had a fair number of them, particularly in Africa, since The Bomb was written. But we have had a steady level of attrition of malnutrition and malnutrition-related disease. Probably something on the order of 5 to 10 million people starve to death each year, but they're spread out; they're not dramatic news events. — Paul R. Ehrlich

We know that if you have $20 million, it's better to buy a van Gough print than it is buy an executive jet, from the point of view of the environment. But when you start getting down, it's like the recycling question: What are things we can really afford to do, and how much pleasure do we get out of them? We haven't even started to have that discussion, and it's getting awfully late. — Paul R. Ehrlich

People have not made the connection that the more of us there are, the more greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere. The Chinese have. They, unlike us, have a population policy. The right wingers just don't understand that the country they're in is probably the most overpopulated in the world, the one doing most of the destruction, and the one with horrendously bad leadership. — Paul R. Ehrlich

I've always believed the words that came out of my mouth were most comfortable when I'd written them. — Bob Ehrlich

Pride is a great energizer for me. --Titus Ray, Chapter 1. — Luana Ehrlich

You take the huge income that comes with a big gas tax, and you use it to pay off regressive taxes like the FICA [Federal Insurance Contributions Act] tax. You can help the poor in other ways besides giving them cheap gas. You want to send the message that people want to be as efficient as possible using gasoline until we can transition away from that need entirely. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience. — Thomas Ehrlich

Woman should have the choice whether to have an abortion or not, but I like what Bill Clinton said: It ought to be safe and rare. You don't want to offend people with it. You try and do as much as you can to let people be different, but also to try and protect them from things that they think are bad. And it's worth all of us giving a little. — Paul R. Ehrlich

We're betting, at this place and this time, we have people ready for change in the state of Maryland. — Bob Ehrlich

We're never all going to agree with each other. We have to learn to value the diversity. It's one of the presumable principles of our government that isn't followed nearly enough - one of the jobs of the majority is to try and make the minority feel comfortable. — Paul R. Ehrlich

June marked the end of spring on California's central coast and the beginning of five months of dormancy that often erupted in fire. Mustard's yellow robes had long since turned red, then brown. Fog and sun mixed to create haze. The land had rusted. The mountains, once blue-hued with young oaks and blooming ceanosis, were tan and gray. I walked across the fallen blossoms of five yucca plants: only the bare poles of their stems remained to mark where their lights had shone the way. — Gretel Ehrlich

I don't think scientists can dictate from above what we should do, because it's not a matter of scientific decision. If you want to have everybody living like a Beverly Hills millionaire, then 2 billion people might be too many. If we want to have a battery-chicken kind of world, with everybody having an absolute minimum diet, you might be able to support 10 billion. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life. — Gretel Ehrlich

The main thing is, and of course this is a pedant talking, we should start our education on these issues in kindergarten. Instead of saying, "See Spot run," we ought to say, "See the plant grow in the sun." We ought to explain what runs the weather in the third or fourth grade to start out with. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Few problems are less recognized, but more important than, the accelerating disappearance of the earth's biological resources. In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Selfies are disgusting. — Brenna Ehrlich

The fog lifted in the evening and a blue-black band at the horizon marked the end of the sea and the beginning of thought. Where does a beginning begin when nothing has gone on before? — Gretel Ehrlich

So, regarding the time frame, I'm only too willing to admit that my crystal ball, like everybody else's, is cracked. If I could predict precisely, I would have started predicting the stock market and would now be living with a bunch of young women on Bora Bora, having bought it. — Paul R. Ehrlich

I don't like the idea of teaching religion in schools, and creation is not my thing, but that's a trivial point compared to saving the creation. I'd much rather have half of the people in the country be creationists and work really hard to save the creation than have everybody be evolutionists and be destroying the planet. — Paul R. Ehrlich

I started traveling in the Arctic in 1991, so I experienced the ice in winter and spring. The seasonal sea ice, it has a long season. It starts in September and ends in June. — Gretel Ehrlich

In regard to the aetiology of infectious diseases we must abandon the notions conceived in time of Koch, Ehrlich and Pasteur on the 'pathogenic' nature of the microorganisms of external and internal media. In the full sense of the word it is not the bacteria themselves that are pathogenic, but those physiological correlations which exist in the given organism at a particular moment and which are organically connected with the disturbances in its regulative systems and nervous mechanisms. There are no special 'pathogenic' microbes in nature; there are, however, no end of factors that promote susceptibility in a normally resistant subject, and vice versa. — Arshavir Ter Hovannessian

Ehrlich hedged. The cancer cell, he explained, was a fundamentally different target from a bacterial cell. Specific affinity relied, paradoxically, not on "affinity," but on its opposite - on difference. Ehrlich's chemicals had successfully targeted bacteria because bacterial enzymes were so radically dissimilar to human enzymes. With cancer, it was the similarity of the cancer cell to the normal human cell that made it nearly impossible to target. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I kind of like carbon taxes because we already know how to apply them. We already have apparatus in place. When we talk about these other solutions - like a billion tons of iron filings in the ocean or putting sunshades between us and the sun - they're huge. We have no idea if they will work. We have no idea what their nasty consequences might be. And it's unlikely we can do them anyway. — Paul R. Ehrlich

I've never minded finding out what others thought I didn't know. Titus Ray, Chapter 3 — Luana Ehrlich

Leaders do not sway with the polls. Instead, they sway the polls through their own words and actions. — Bob Ehrlich

A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning. — Gretel Ehrlich

Twin terrors: to be awake; to be asleep. — Gretel Ehrlich

There's all of this stuff where we have so much debate over nonsense; it could be cured if we had a better educational system, if we trained people to really try and look into things on their own. That's a tough thing to do, particularly with the educational system staggering. — Paul R. Ehrlich

A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree. — Gretel Ehrlich

Trying to separate the contributions of nature and nurture to an attribute is rather like trying to separate the contributions of length and width to the area of a rectangle, which at first glance also seems easy. When you think about it carefully, though, it proves impossible. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Thoughtful people of different political philosophies can disagree, but in a very agreeable manner. — Bob Ehrlich

With taxes, if they aren't working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It's basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. — Gretel Ehrlich

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals. — Gretel Ehrlich

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"
an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness. — Gretel Ehrlich

All scientists who've looked at it know we have to phase away from burning fossil fuels. That means we've got to put a lot of effort into alternate energy technologies, but we're still subsidizing fossil fuels and not subsidizing most of the alternatives. It's not going to be an easy transition. — Paul R. Ehrlich

I'm a competitive person. — Bob Ehrlich

To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves. — Gretel Ehrlich

We can dig ourselves out of the ditch that the progressives and Obama-ites have driven us into. — Bob Ehrlich

There is an increasing sense of what can be called legal pollution. — Thomas Ehrlich

To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire's back unanchored from season to season. — Gretel Ehrlich

To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed. — Gretel Ehrlich

I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce. — Gretel Ehrlich

Assumptions can get you killed. --Titus Ray, Chapter 2 — Luana Ehrlich

People travel and hunt on the sea ice - in Alaska, they hunt in skin boats for bowhead whales; in Greenland, they hunt with dogsleds. The ice is their highway. The ice is also the ecosystem in which marine mammals and terrestrial animals such as polar bears exist. — Gretel Ehrlich

For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizens to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby. — Mark Steyn

No one heard about Bill Clinton on his first trip to New Hampshire. I showed Mike Huckabee around the state years before he ran, and no one knew him then, either. — Bob Ehrlich

Maryland has a tradition of Democratic Party conservatism. — Bob Ehrlich

We have no more fundamental obligation in government than to ensure the safety of our citizens. — Bob Ehrlich

We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least - a fear of 'dry spells,' dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize. — Gretel Ehrlich

Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we've been or how are bank accounts describe us. What's obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what's bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we're transparent to them and thus exposed - we're finally ourselves. — Gretel Ehrlich

I don't know what leadership is. You can't touch it. You can't feel it. It's not tangible. But I do know this: you recognize it when you see it. — Bob Ehrlich

Sometimes I think the Congress feels that if you only decided tomorrow to switch to wind power that in two years we'd be getting 80 percent of our electricity from wind power. It's nonsense. Normally it takes 20 to 30 years after a new technology is demonstrated and deployed before it powers even 15 or 20 percent of the grid. There's this long lag time, and we haven't even decided which directions to go. — Paul R. Ehrlich

When I was your age, I would go to plays all the time, just sit in the darkness and try to take it all in inside me. Contain everything in some corner of my heart so that when I had my shot, it could all come pouring out - all the lights and moments and colour. — Brenna Ehrlich

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals. — Gretel Ehrlich

People have to decide, first of all, how they'd like to live, and how secure they want to be from disaster. After that, scientists can help determine what would be necessary to achieve that. — Paul R. Ehrlich

A complete investment in the Obama administration required that any real opposition had to be demonized. The investment in Barack Obama had to be protected. — Bob Ehrlich

Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild is an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live. — Gretel Ehrlich

We've all got to get together and demand something better out of our government and out of each other. We've got a system that's making us working harder, and isn't giving us satisfaction. We've got to sit down and decide what the hell we really want to be as human beings. — Paul R. Ehrlich

By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people. — Paul R. Ehrlich

We discussed politics, but we also talked about the importance of hard work, personal responsibility, living within your means, keeping your word. Those lessons stay with you throughout your life. — Bob Ehrlich

He walked out of the cottage and into the night.
He was stark naked. — Max Ehrlich

I desire a person, not a gender. — Matthew C. Ehrlich

Some days I think this one place isn't enough. That's when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and be allowed to love without limits. Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no destinations. Only then do I see, at least momentarily, that everything is here. — Gretel Ehrlich

Hales," he purrs quietly with closed eyes, his nose grazing my flesh. "I am so yours, more than I've ever been mine. — Sigal Ehrlich

There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water. — Paul R. Ehrlich

There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration. — Gretel Ehrlich

To trace the history of a river ... is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. — Gretel Ehrlich

If President Obama has his way, you won't recognize the government, the free market system, or, frankly, America as you once knew it. His admonitions and his audacious policy goals demonstrate very clear motives: equalize, discourage dissent, and become a nation of apologists. — Bob Ehrlich

There's something to be said for silence. --Titus Ray, Chapter 25 — Luana Ehrlich

Your children should have it impressed upon them that their adult life-style will bear very little resemblance to yours and that they should now be acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and tastes that will sustain them in less materially affluent circumstances. On the other hand, the fresh insights and imaginations of your children may help you find a viable future while there's still time. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Ecologist Paul Ehrlich stressed that people who hold opposing opinions need to engage in open discussion with well-reasoned dissent. Positions should be questioned and criticized, not the people who hold them. Personal attacks preclude open discussion because, once someone is put on the defensive, fruitful exchanges are impossible, at least for the moment. — Marc Bekoff

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly. — Gretel Ehrlich

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons. — Gretel Ehrlich

There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow. — Gretel Ehrlich

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer. — Paul R. Ehrlich

The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life. — Gretel Ehrlich

Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I'm all right so far? — Gretel Ehrlich

I promised her an interesting life and good food, and the rest is history. — Bob Ehrlich

I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its mulitplicity and endless variety, come in. — Gretel Ehrlich

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. — Paul R. Ehrlich

The National Academy of Sciences would be unable to give a unanimous decision if asked whether the sun would rise tomorrow. — Paul R. Ehrlich

Art museums are little more than big buildings where rectangular old men, hung on the walls by their backs, wait for young people to come stand in front of them. — Adam Ehrlich Sachs