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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.

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
Shapes
Primary
Profitless
Conditions
Puts
Sterile
Focus
Vast
Distorted
Rather
Concept
Untrue
Force
Shape
Channel
Making
Forces
Unnatural
Nature
Direction
Biology
Men
Concepts
Primaries

More quotes by Rachel Carson

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Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.
Rachel Carson
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For all at last return to the sea- to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.
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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
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Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.
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Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.
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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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Drink in the beauty and wonder at the meaning of what you see.
Rachel Carson
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Darling -- I suppose the world would consider us absolutely crazy, but it is wonderful to feel that way, isn't it? Sort of a perpetual springtime in our hearts.
Rachel Carson
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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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It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.
Rachel Carson
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Then the song of a whitethroat, pure and ethereal, with the dreamy quality of remembered joy.
Rachel Carson
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It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
Rachel Carson
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We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.
Rachel Carson
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There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.
Rachel Carson
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By suggestion and example, I believe children can be helped to hear the many voices about them. Take Time to listen and talk about the voices of the earth and what they mean-the majestic voice of thunder, the winds, the sound of surf or flowing streams.
Rachel Carson
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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.
Rachel Carson
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I still feel there is a case to be made for my old belief that as man approaches the 'new heaven and the new earth' -- or the space-age universe, if you will, he must do so with humility rather than with arrogance.
Rachel Carson
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We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.
Rachel Carson
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The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became. I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.
Rachel Carson
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Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.
Rachel Carson