This is the summer of action. Don't invite me out unless you're making a positive impact. I'm busy doing my part and fucking sick of waiting for you to do yours.

"We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive." - Martin Luther King Jr.

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them." - Bill Vaughn

"There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before." - Robert Lynd

"The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Peter Drucker

"How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?" - Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, November 1939

"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems."- Mahatma Ghandi

"The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows." - Paul A. Samuelson

"They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." - Andy Warhol

"The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages." - Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, ?tats et empires de la lune, 1656

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." - Ghandi

"Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility." - Albert Schweitzer

"It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood." - Bernand De Voto, Fortune, June 1947

"When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone." - George O'Neil

"If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age." - Jacques Barzun

"The reason people blame things on the previous generations is that there's only one other choice." - Doug Larson

"Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work." - Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland

"Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us." - Henrik Tikkanen

"Don't spend your precious time asking 'Why isn't the world a better place?' It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is 'How can I make it better?' To that there is an answer." - Leo F. Buscaglia

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." - Native American Proverb

"Responsibility is the price of freedom." - Elbert Hubbard

"We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.

"The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river." - Ross Perot

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." - Jean-Paul Sartre

"Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites." - William Ruckelshaus

"The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment." - Ansel Adams

"If you take responsibility for yourself you will develop a hunger to accomplish your dreams." - Les Brown

We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them. We say we love trees, yet we cut them down. And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are loved. - Author Unknown

"It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men will do when they don't have to." - Walter Linn

"The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future." - Marya Mannes

"When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So, what the hell, leap!" - Cynthia Heimel

"Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?" - Pierre Troubetzkoy

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." - Johann von Goethe

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect." - Chief Seattle, 1855

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." - William James

"I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?" - Robert Redford

"I never worry about action, only inaction." - Winston Churchill

"You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'in?galit? parmi les hommes, 1755

"I think there is something, more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers, there aren't enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision." - Clement Stone

"The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself." - Ernest Jones

"I will not condemn you for what you did yesterday, if you do it right today." - Sheldon S. Maye

"The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too." - Chief Luther Standing Bear

"It is always your next move." - Napoleon Hill

"How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore." - Anonymous Wintu Woman

"It is by acts and not by ideas that people live." - Anatole France

"Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature." - Dave Foreman

"Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish." - Jean De La Fontaine

"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual." - John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." - Edmund Burke

"Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it." - Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848

"The time is always right to do what is right." - Martin Luther King Jr.

"God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts." - Mahatma Gandhi

"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it." - Norman Schwarzkopf

"Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day." - Stephen Jay Gould

"Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means." - Albert Einstein

"We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants, but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves." - Arnold Toynbee

"Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned." - Peter Marshall

"Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow." - Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America, 1956

"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." - John Wooden

"And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess." - Art Buchwald

"Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin." - Grace Hansen

"It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

"Don't wait for someone to take you under their wing. Find a good wing and climb up underneath it." - Frank C. Bucaro

"Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation." - Jean Arp

"One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... if it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along." - Franklin D Roosevelt

"When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves." - David Orr

"Others can stop you temporarily - you are the only one who can do it permanently." - Zig Ziglar

"I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers." - Ymber Delecto

"Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice." - Henry Ford

"Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea." - George Carlin

"Begin to free yourself at once by doing all that is possible with the means you have, and as you proceed in this spirit the way will open for you to do more." - Robert Collier

"So bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century." - Philip Shabecoff

"Begin doing what you want to do now. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand - and melting like a snowflake." - Marie Beyon Ray

"A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist. If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it's taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power. His fairness. His very existence. But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says - go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job. Or, better yet, lend me a hand. I have no time for idle whining." - David Brin

"A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions." - Confucius

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein, 1950

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including man. All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found ways of ignoring them." - Eugene M. Poirot, Our Margin of Life, 1978

"You will give yourself peace of mind if you perform every act of your life as if it were your last." - Marcus Aurelius

"As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them." - U. Thant

"You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it." - Charles Buxton.

"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death." - Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962

"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought." - Henri Bergson

"If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos." - Edward O. Wilson

"To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right." - Confucius

"Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life." - Ren? Dubos, quoted in Life, 28 July 1970

"The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." - Lao Tzu

"Our children may save us if they are taught to care properly for the planet; but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the caves from where we first emerged. Then we'll have to view the universe above from a cold, dark place. No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones, [designer] drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea." - Jimmy Buffet, Mother Earth News, March-April 1990

"Each one of us has a fire in our heart for something. It's our goal in life to find it and to keep it lit." - Mary Lou Retton

"Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system." - Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970

"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." - Will Rogers

"The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness is many times more powerful if it is earned through physical achievement, if it comes at the end of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous good health is necessary. Practically speaking, this means that no one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means." - Garrett Hardin, The Ecologist, February 1974

"Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare." - Japanese Proverb

"The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies." - Al Gore

Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be.
Become one yourself! - Marcul Aurelius

"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves." - Native American Wisdom

"He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom." - Arthur Schopenhauer



"One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England." - Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech, Argonne National Laboratory, 1969