David R. Brower Quotes

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent

Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of that problem. It has to be addressed.

Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.

Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.

Sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this.

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

Without wilderness, the world's a cage.

Apollo 13, as you may remember, gave us a reactor that is bubbling away right now somewhere in the Pacific. It's supposed to be bubbling away on the moon, but it's in the Pacific Ocean instead.

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.

It is absolutely imperative that we protect, preserve and pass on this genetic heritage for man and every other living thing in as good a condition as we received it.

Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever.

We still need conservationists who will attempt the impossible, achieving it because they aren't aware how impossible it is.

There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place!

I was actually telling people that - by harnessing the atom - we could enter a new era of unlimited power that would do away with the need to dam our beautiful streams.

I'm always impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it's impossible

There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river.

To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

If you want to get people off drugs, improve reality.

Politics is democracy's way of handling public business. We won't get the type of country in the kind of world we want unless people take part in the public's business.

Polite conservationists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.

True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot.

There is more inside you than you dare think.

We need the sea. We need a place to stand and touch and listen - to feel the pusle of the world as the surf rolls in.

When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle.

I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that.

It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.

Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people.

Perhaps we'll realize that each of us has not one vote but ten thousand or a million.

A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one.

Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.

For how many people do you think might yet stand on this planet before the sun grows cold? That's the responsibility we hold in our hands.

Yet another proposal would have us rocket the waste into the sun, but, as you're probably aware, about one in ten of our space shots doesn't quite make it out of the earth's gravitational field.

I began working with the John Muir Institute and then started helping found Friends of the Earth organizations here and there in other countries. That pretty well brings us up to the present.

Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine.

We cannot go on fiddling while the earth's wild places burn.

If something's going wrong with this planet we'd better fix it here and not look for some sort of escape.

Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.

Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad.

The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope.

There is no business on a dead planet

The Peninsula is what we have and there is no more where it came from.

People have alleged that I have inspired many young people over the years, but I say, it was just the opposite.

I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system.

You don't have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.

What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.

I believe in the rights of creatures other than man.

While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind.

Have fun saving the world, or you are just going to depress yourself.