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Because we humans don’t notice changes that take place slowly, incrementally, we tend to underestimate their cumulative effects, even within the span of one or two lifetimes.

— Scott Weidensaul Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds (1999)

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More quotes by Scott Weidensaul

Mexico affords legal protection to raptors, but it is a paper law only, poorly enforced and widely ignored in the field.

Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds (1999)

Of course, for environmental havoc, no organism can quite compare to humans.

Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds (1999)

It is a prairie’s gentle deceit that you think you see everything there is in a single, sweeping glance, when in fact you see very little at all, even if you spend a lifetime looking.

Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds (1999)

Stone makes a statement as true today as it was then, the reason why conservationists can never let down their guard: “As one menace is disposed of, another seems inevitably to develop.”

Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds (1999)

You won’t find the cerulean warbler on the federal Endangered Species list; it is not so far gone as to rate that kind of last-gasp governmental life support, which is usually withheld until it is too late to do much good.

Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds (1999)

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Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident.

Robert F. Kennedy

He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Samuel Johnson The Idler (1758)

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. (Weil die Dinge sind, wie sie sind, werden die Dinge nicht so bleiben wie sie sind.)

Bertolt Brecht Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1976)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Scott Weidensaul (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.