12 quotes
The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.
Silent Spring (1962)
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair.
Silent Spring (1962)
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.
Silent Spring (1962)
Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.
Silent Spring (1962)
Given time-time not in years but in millennia-life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.
Silent Spring (1962)
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?
Silent Spring (1962)
Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides."
Silent Spring (1962)
Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.
Silent Spring (1962)
It is a sobering fact...that the method of massive chemical control has had only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb.
Silent Spring (1962)
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.
Silent Spring (1962)
The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped-500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.
Silent Spring (1962)
Now at last, as it has become apparent that the heedless and unrestrained use of chemicals is a greater menace to ourselves than to the targets, the river which is the science of biotic control flows again, fed by new streams of thought.
Silent Spring (1962)