Silent Spring QUOTES

1 " Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

2 " A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

3 " To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

4 " The obligation to endure gives us the right to know. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

5 " Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good? "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

6 " Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

7 " We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

8 " We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

9 " Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

10 " As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

11 " Such plants are "weeds" only to those who make a business of selling and applying chemicals. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

12 " Among the herbicides are some that are classified as 'mutagens' or agents capable of modifying the genes, the materials of heredity. We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment? "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

13 " If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem. "

― Rachel Carson , Silent Spring

14 " ...[T]here is no "safe" dose of a carcinogen. "