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For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future... Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time.

Rachel Carson

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Rachel Carson
Age: 56 †
Born: 1907
Born: May 27
Died: 1964
Died: April 14
Author
Conservationist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Marine Biologist
Non-Fiction Writer
Zoologist
Rachel Carson House
Rachel Louise Carson
Rachel L. Carson
Life
Environment
Link
Future
Infinitely
Individual
Links
Past
Heritage
Whole
Agents
Made
Possession
Deterioration
Men
Valuable
Menace
Time
Mankind
Genetic

More quotes by Rachel Carson

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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.
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The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
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Our attitude towards plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith.
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I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.
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One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space.
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Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we will say our work is finished.
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This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.
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It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.
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To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view.
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Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.
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Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life.
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The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind - that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. . . . Now I can believe I have at least helped a little.
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Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.
Rachel Carson
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We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow.
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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?
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When any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end as natural. When that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.
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The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
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Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.
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Autumn comes to the sea with a fresh blaze of phosphorescence, when every wave crest is aflame. Here and there the whole surface may glow with sheets of cold fire, while below schools of fish pour through the water like molten metal.
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If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Rachel Carson