Polluted River Quotes & Sayings

China uses about half of the world's cement for its new roads and buildings.
According to the World Bank in 2007, China had 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities.
One day in January 2013, the air pollution index in Beijing was 755 - measured on a scale of 0 to 500!
In late 2012, 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in the river that supplies water to
Shanghai, the PRC's largest city.
For 2010, a ministry of the Chinese government estimated the monetary cost of the environmental damage caused by rapid industrialization at $230 billion, which is 3.5 percent of China's gross domestic product.
Air pollution from Chinese factories wafts over to the Koreas and Japan. Sometimes, upper atmospheric winds carry the sulphur dioxide from China's coal-burning clear over to North America's west coast. — James Peoples

Music speaks of Platonic truth - the ideal river rather than the polluted reality, love as we dream it rather than we experience it, grief noble and uplifting rather than our distracted weeping. It is necessary to our survival and our sanity. — Pam Brown

A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging. — Barry Lyga

The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me? — Jeanette Winterson

He dreamed at one point in his slumbers of New York. In his dream he was walking late at night along the East Side, beside the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new lifeforms were now emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights. — Douglas Adams

In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea to receive a polluted river without becoming defiled. I bring you the Superman! He is that sea; in him your great contempt can be submerged. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Although the United States has made tremendous progress cleaning up its water by removing billions of pounds of pollutants and doubling the number of waterways safe for fishing and swimming, a majority of Americans live within 10 miles of a polluted lake, river, stream or coastal area. — Carol Browner

Sex-centered magazines litter our newsstands ... each edition trying to escape new laws from the bottom of the sewers. We put lids on sewer holes. Ought we not to do something about the pornography which is spewing out a polluted river of filth which can destroy us faster than any chemical pollution we seem so worried about?7 — Billy Graham

He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Then Trout made a good point, too. 'Well,' he said, 'I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidentally dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil,' or whoever it was that dumped it.' Trout raised his arms in celebration. 'Up your ass with Mobil gas,' he said. — Kurt Vonnegut

Acheron is the Greek Underworld river, timelessly flowing beneath Middle World consciousness, circulating through our bloodstreams in varying states from polluted to pristine. Freud was fond of this line from Virgil's Aeneid: "If I cannot bend the gods, then I shall stir up Acheron. — Mary Trainor-Brigham

Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money. — Native American Saying

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck. — Cyril Connolly

You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked! — Utah Phillips

It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted. — Elizabeth Gilbert

At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe"? — Peggy Noonan

Only when the last tree is cut; only when the last river is polluted; only when the last fish is caught; only then will they realize that you cannot eat money." The Cree Indians — Terry Ross

The moment we turn over the soil we start poisoning it and we go on poisoning it all the way through ... and there's probably not a river in the United States that doesn't have pesticide poisoning in it. The fish are dying. The seas are getting polluted. All of these things are happening. The rain forests are going. That's what the context is. — W.S. Merwin

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one's mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

in truth man is polluted river. one must be a sea to receive a polluted river without becoming defiled. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Not to wax nostalgic about the 1970s, but back then people got upset when they saw injustice. They got tired of seeing our air, land and water polluted. They were shocked when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was polluted so badly it caught fire. And on one great day 20 million Americans marched all across this land. Politicians had no choice but to take notice. — John F. Kerry

What's happening on the Colorado River is happening all over the world. The water is overused, overdammed, and it's polluted in some places. — Greg MacGillivray