Charles Eisenstein, Oral presentation in Baltimore, MD March 2012
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
Speech accepting the John Burroughs Medal (April 1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 94
Context: Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.
There is certainly no single remedy for this condition and I am offering no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
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Rachel Carson 42
American marine biologist and conservationist 1907–1964Related quotes

Speech at the Dedication of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, September 2, 1940
1940s

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 22 (p. 203)

more and louder than ever before.
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)
On the impact that poetry has had on his life in “Deaf poetics: Conversation with Raymond Antrobus" https://poetryinternationalonline.com/conversation-with-raymond-antrobus/ (Poetry International; 2018 Oct 11)

How the Self Controls Its Brain (1994)
Context: The more we discover scientifically about the brain the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena and the more wonderful do the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a superstition held by dogmatic materialists. It has all the features of a Messianic prophecy, with the promise of a future freed of all problems—a kind of Nirvana for our unfortunate successors.