Quotes & Sayings About Not Polluting

By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water. — Aeschylus

The consequences of an ungrateful spirit are not as readily seen as, say, those of a contagious disease. But they are no less deadly. Western civilization has fallen prey to an epidemic of ingratitude. Like a poisonous vapor, this subtle sin is polluting our lives, our homes, our churches, and our culture. — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

I could cut my leg of; I could cut my arm off. I could gouge my eye out - I'd still probably survive, but not very well, and that's what we're doing to the ocean. It's the life support system of this planet. We've been dumping in it, we've been polluting it, we've been destroying it for decades, and we're essentially maiming ourselves. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines. — Isaac Asimov

And round and round and round. Why couldn't I get past the letter? Like poison id had seeped into every image and every memory I kept of Callum, polluting them until I couldn't tell which was real and what was just wishful thinking any more. Until at last, I was forced to face the inescapable fact that, for whatever reason, Callum had written the letter. — Malorie Blackman

The things that drive me crazy are coming from this place of people suffering because of people polluting into rivers or whatever. It's not simply just about systems; it's an emotional reaction to seeing animals or people suffering. — Mike White

It wasn't the lower classes that preached the religion of sexual liberation. That came from the upper classes, with their comfortable cushions against the resulting disorder. What did it matter to them that they were polluting the waters? Their houses were upstream. The biological absurdism of same-sex pseudogamy (mock-marriage) is just the latest effort of the same irresponsible destroyers. Let those who are in favor of the world that the sexual revolution has produced defend it on its "merits," and not decree all discussion out of bounds from the beginning. We are not talking about privacy here, but about the air we all must breathe and the water we all must drink. — Anthony M. Esolen

Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned. — B.F. Skinner

So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence. — Sebastiao Salgado

I believe that people were not so allergic to their environment until they began polluting themselves and their world with so many drugs and toxins. — Garth Stein

The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust.111 Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination. 112 And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle - a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was ethnic cleansing. — Steven Pinker

As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture. — Wes Jackson

Die human, DIE!! Die nasty polluting person!!!!' yelled Grover. I turned him so he faced me. He kept on clicking his plastic gun towards me as if I was part of the game. — Rick Riordan

Fracking has been used for more than 60 years to successfully drill over a million oil and gas wells in the U.S. Nonetheless, the prevailing mythology on the radical left is that the technology is 'poisoning our children' by polluting the water we drink and the air we breathe. — Bob Beauprez

How stupid would that sound? It was high school, not the Hindu cast system, where the Untouchables have to avoid 'polluting' the upper classes. — Marni Bates

A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas. — Daniel J. Levitin

If the godly give in to the wicked, it's like polluting a fountain or muddying a spring. — Anonymous

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine) — Wendell Berry

The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute. — Gloria Steinem

Conserving energy and thus saving money, reducing consumption of unnecessary products and packaging and shifting to a clean-energy economy would likely hurt the bottom line of polluting industries, but would undoubtedly have positive effects for most of us. — David Suzuki

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins. — Jeff Goodell

We were polluting the planet with our numbers; if we were breeding less it was to be welcomed. — P.D. James

The greatest polluting element in the earth's environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields. I consider that to be a far greater threat on a global scale than warming, or the increase of chemical elements in the environment. — Robert O. Becker

Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations. — Liu Cixin

We shouldn't fuel the future with the polluting methods of the past, ... We have the technology to power our future in ways that don't threaten our health or poison our planet. Let's choose to use it. — Denis Hayes

If you tell people, 'that old banger of yours, we're going to tax the hell out of it,' they'll rightly tell you to get lost. But if you tell people that when they next buy a car, the tax will be adjusted so that the cleanest ones will cost less and the polluting ones will cost more, most people would say 'fair enough.' — Zac Goldsmith

I was polluting the bed with dreams. — Henry Miller

It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar surface. — Charles Lamb

There's a lot to be said about what's happening to our ocean, big companies polluting it with their oil and all the raw garbage that's being spilled in there. — Lloyd Bridges

Man is taking over the forests and polluting the oceans, the animal species are threatened. I try to contribute as much as I can. We're really messing up our environment. I try to get people more aware of what's going on so that they can, even in a local way, try to prevent pollution to their lakes and rivers and prevent nuclear dumping in the oceans - it's bad enough that they're doing it in residential areas, but putting it in the ocean! Eventually it's going to pollute our food resources and, if the ocean dies, we're gone. — Olivia Newton-John

I'm so moved when I see everyday Americans standing together, against all odds, to make their lives and communities better - whether it's organizing against big factories polluting their air or against big banks corrupting our economy and political system. — Sally Kohn

It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations - the list of ideological outrages goes on and — Naomi Klein

Globalised manufacturing and procurement mean that a lot of high-polluting, heavy duty jobs are transferred to China. We will ask major companies, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft and IBM to put pressure on their Chinese suppliers. — Ma Jun

The incidence of Alzheimer's disease is growing at a pace like never before, affecting people at a younger and younger age. This is the direct effect of nuclear radiation polluting the air of our planet from the power stations and other nuclear experimentation. — Benjamin Creme

Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children
They will not be the same next time. The sayings
so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.
Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in
the more securely to the worldly buzz
of television, alphabet, and street talk,
culture polluting their gazes' dawn blue.
It makes you see at last the value of
those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells
of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces
like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)
who knew you from the start, when you were zero,
cooing their nothings before you could be bored
or knew a name, not even you own, or how
this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye. — John Updike

The coal industry is a huge industry when we're talking about polluting the environment, our air and our waterways. — Gloria Reuben

The pollution problem is always seen as someone who was doing something bad that has to be stopped. To me, pollution is doing something bad and good. People don't pollute because they like polluting. They do it because it's a cheaper way of producing something else. — Ronald Coase

The giant industries that are polluting our planet as well as violating human rights worldwide are the ones nearest and dearest to the hearts of American politicians. — Woody Harrelson

Jealousy is such a potent threatening emotion. It doesn't just eat you alive - it eats you from within. It's venom that spreads in your bloodstream, polluting you, killing you. It corrodes you until there's nothing left. — Mia Asher

Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism? — Charles Clover

It is understandable, therefore, that the movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion. The core belief is that humankind inherited a pristine Eden, has sinned greatly by polluting it, and must now suffer lest we all perish in a fiery apocalypse. — Steven D. Levitt

In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it. — Barry Commoner

Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar and
perhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality. — Alan W. Watts

Polluting his brain with a hunger so base that it would have made him vomit had he had any possession of his own body. The hunger was more than a desire for food, for sex or for power. The hunger was a vacuum, an endless vortex that consumed every thought, every impulse of who and what he was. He tried to scream but it wouldn't let him. — William C. Dietz

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

I hear my own daughters talking about big companies polluting the environment, and then I realise they are talking about companies of which one I am running. But when I tell them to read the things we are doing, then they realise we are doing good things. But millennials are really a great lot. — Indra Nooyi

Catalysts offer the promise of making chemical transformations far less polluting. — Robert H. Grubbs

You think civilization is some horrible, polluting human invention that separates us from the state of nature. But civilization doesn't separate us from nature. Civilization protects us from nature. — CRICHTON Michael

Beyond the harm to local wildlife, any chemicals we used in our garden might end up polluting our well, or run off the property. In a heavy rainstorm, this runoff may end up in nearby Beaver Creek, a tributary to the Brandywine Creek, which runs into the Delaware River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean. These kinds of direct connections with the outside world exist in every garden, which is why I think we should always aim, in our gardening practices, to do the least harm and the greatest good. — David L. Culp

One of the best safeguards of our hopes, I have suggested, is to be able to mark off the areas of hopelessness and to acknowledge them, to face them directly, not with despair but with the creative intent of keeping them from polluting all the areas of possibility. — William F. Lynch

We have laws against polluting our rivers but not against polluting our minds. — Robert Barron

... by treating nature as exterior and inferior to humans we saw no harm to ourselves in polluting the soil, the plants, the air and the water. We did not notice the effect of our pollution on whatever walked over it, ran across it, climbed up it, flew through it, or swam in it.

Now we notice that harming other constituents of our planetary system brings harm to ourselves. — Betty Jean Craige

And in the process, we have come up with fuels - algae-based fuels, isobutanol-based fuels and other fuels - that we think will power the planes in the future so that, you know, by 2020 I hope that our planes will be powered on fuels that are clean fuels and are not polluting the environment so that we'll have a green airline and an airline that actually has fuels that will be hopefully cheaper than the dirty fuels of the past. So [we're] doing good and also turning a profit at the same time. — Richard Branson

Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution. — Eckhart Tolle

That includes not cutting down the rain forest, and stop polluting the ocean because once we kill the coral reefs and the rain forest, this earth is toast. — Michael Berryman

We've sued out-of-state power plants that are polluting our air and led a coalition of attorneys general from Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Massachusetts against efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives to remove critical environmental regulations that protect New York communities from toxic pollution. — Eric Schneiderman

Die,human! Die, silly polluting nasty person! — Rick Riordan

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

We need an energy revolution by breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, polluting fuels ... I am very, very confident our small state will lead this. We will be noticed by the country and the world. — Bernie Sanders

CREEP
Other people have written about war. About how one plane sweeps over and the whole place is ablaze in minutes. About how a young man may kill another young many with perfect legality. I prefer to write about less sudden things. About how we inch further away without even noticing. And then it's too late. Or is it? No it's not too late to say sorry, we were wrong, let's try again to get along. No, it's not too late to quit lying, halt the greed, stop polluting air earth and seas. I prefer to write about less noisy things. About change happening so gradually that one day you just accept the world as different. And you don't question because you're old, and you don't feel like making waves, and anyway, they'd say you were insane ... — Jay Woodman

How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It's more evident now. — Maya Lin

With Zipcar, consumers avoid the upfront cost of buying a car, not to mention gas, insurance, and repairs. Plus, they reduce the number of polluting vehicles on the road. Suddenly the planet-smart carless option is also the convenient money-saving option. — Lynn Jurich

Green policy is about triggering a shift to a cleaner way of doing things. To be effective, it needs to incentivise the right behaviour, for example through tax breaks, and that needs to be paid for by disincentives on polluting behaviour. — Zac Goldsmith

I get to be the mayor of the capital city of the most polluting state of the most polluting country on the planet ... I see truly a non-carbon economy. It's cleaner. It's healthier. We're about out of alternatives, so it's going to be easier and more cost effective to start to do the right thing. — Will Wynn

Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it's filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas. — Jeff Goodell

For people who currently have to burn fossil fuels to produce meager, polluting light, LED lighting is a game changer. — Shuji Nakamura

Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business. — Jeff Goodell

We believe widespread adoption of home solar will significantly improve life in cities by phasing out polluting coal plants, eliminating miles of ugly new transmission lines, and ensuring cleaner, healthier lives. — Lynn Jurich

The people with money were meddling in mechanical and design affairs. They were interjecting their mediocre ideas into the process and polluting it. — Robert Greene

I myself have read the writings and teachings of the heretics, polluting my soul for a while with their abominable notions, though deriving this benefit: I was able to refute them for myself and loathe them even more. — Eusebius

I would like to say, for the record, that I am in favor of using more American Indians and other minorities in motion pictures, I am against polluting the oceans of the world, I am for every nationality having its own homeland, I am against whacking baby seals on the head, and I am for saving the whales. — Johnny Carson

In recent years, a green burial movement has protested formaldehyde, which oxidizes to formic acid, the toxic in fire ants and bee stingers, as yet one more poison to leach into water tables: careless people, polluting even from the tomb. — Alan Weisman

Contrary to what you might think, China's economy is relatively less efficient, and more polluting, than those of rich countries. — James Fallows

The environmental benefits of hydrogen are also outstanding. When used as an energy source, hydrogen produces no emissions besides water. Zero polluting emissions, an amazing advance over the current sources of energy that we use. — Dan Lipinski