Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?
—Sue Monk Kidd
Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you—and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I believe that animals have been talking to human beings ever since we were all made and put into this world.
—Barbara Woodhouse
The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
—Germaine Greer
And who shall say—whatever disenchantment follows—that we ever forget magic, or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple tree, the singing, and the gold?
—Thomas Wolfe
The revolt of the poet is invariably conservative at its roots.… Not politically conservative, but imaginatively conservative, with a profound regard for what is given, as earth or air, sun or moon or stars, or the dreams of man.
—Cid Corman
The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.
—J. Paul Getty
Everything on earth [is] beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
—Anton Chekhov
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
—George Orwell
If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
There is no other species on the Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
—Henry David Thoreau
If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
—Jewish Proverb
Independence? That's a middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
—George Bernard Shaw
Now I see the secret of making the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
—Walt Whitman