253 Quotes by Rachel Carson

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change There was a strange stillness The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.

Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.

Only as a child's awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

I am always more interested in what I am about to do than what I have already done.

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.

As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.