Quotes & Sayings About Insecticides

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. — Rachel Carson

I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'. — Antal Szerb

....The chemists' ingenuity in devising insecticides has long ago outrun biological knowledge of the way these poisons affect the living organism. — Rachel Carson

Our agricultural colleges continue to graduate specialists who become vocational agricultural teachers in the schools, and county agents, who go forth to extol the virtues of poison insecticides, herbicides, and commercial fertilizers. — Joe Nichols

It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. — Rachel Carson

Chemistry ... is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides ... for she dispenses the recipes. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

An apple a day might have kept the doctor away prior to the industrialization of food growing and
preparation. But, according to research compiled by the United States Drug Administration (USDA) today's apple contains residue of eleven different neurotoxins - azinphos, methyl chloripyrifos, diazinon, dimethoate, ethion, omthoate, parathion, parathion methyl, phosalone, and phosmet - and the USDA was testing for only one category of chemicals known as organophosphate insecticides. That doesn't sound too appetizing does it? The average apple is sprayed with pesticides seventeen times before it is harvested. — Michelle Schoffro Cook

Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more. — Romain Gary

Chickens are soaked in baths of chlorine to remove slime and odor. Mixtures of excrement, blood, oil, grease, rust, paint, insecticides, and rodent droppings accumulate in processing plants. Maggots and other larvae breed in storage and transportation containers, on the floor, and in processing equipment and packaging, and they drop onto the conveyor belt from infested meat splattered on the ceiling. — Steve Striffler

If there is anything our culture desperately needs to learn about the morality of food production, it is that carrots can be grown using methods devastatingly destructive and deeply immoral--monoculture, herbicides, insecticides, destruction of habitat by plowing to the ditch banks, fill in the blanks--and beefsteaks can be produced in a way that protects and nurtures the soil and the total fabric of life, a pretty moral thing to do, in my mind. — Harvey Ussery

The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures. — Winona LaDuke

What sets the new synthetic insecticides is their enormous biological potency. — Rachel Carson

Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides. — Winona LaDuke

Take care with manufactured chemicals, certainly. Your safety and long term health are more important than anything. Yet don't forget that if you grow even a dozen different plants, you are surrounded by chemistry. Inside their cells even the most ordinary plants creates potent fungicides, insecticides, irritants, balms, hallucinogens, sedatives, nerve toxins, cell repair stimulants, lures, repellents ... you name it. Treat all plants with respect! — Janet Macunovich

I pounded through the houses, staggering down the hallways, falling down the steps. It was a hot streaky dawn full of insecticides, exhaust, flowers that could make you sick or fall in love. My battered Impala was still parked there on the side of the road and I wanted to lie down on the shredded seats and sleep and sleep.
But I thought of the bones; I could hear them singing. They needed me to write their song. — Francesca Lia Block

Alkaloids are natural fungicides, insecticides, and pesticides. It has been estimated that, on average, each of us ingests about a gram and a half of natural pesticide every day, from the plants and plant products in our diet. The estimate for residues from synthetic pesticides is around 0.15 milligrams daily - about ten thousand times less than the natural dose! — Penny Le Couteur