Barry Commoner Quotes

The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational.

The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.

If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

Sooner or later,
wittingly or unwittingly,
we must pay
for every intrusion
on the natural environment.

No action is without its side effects.

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

The major source of photochemical smog - petroleum-fueled vehicles - can be replaced by emission-free electric vehicles.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.

Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.

It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.

When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.

We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.

Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.

The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.

Nothing ever goes away.

The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.

In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.

In certain ways, I'm not very different than I was when I was a teenager.

All of the clean technologies are known, it's a question of simply applying them.

The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.

Technologists practice faith too; 'Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.'