
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
Source: The Life of the Bee
A variant — "Professor Einstein, the learned scientist, once calculated that if all bees disappeared off the earth, four years later all humans would also have disappeared" — appears in The Irish Beekeeper, v.19-20, 1965-66, p74, citing Abeilles et Fleurs (Bees and Flowers, the house magazine of Union Nationale de l'Apiculture Française) for June 1965. Snopes.com mentions its use in a beekeepers' protest in 1994 in Europe http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp suggesting invention and attribution to Einstein for political reasons.
Misattributed
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
Source: The Life of the Bee
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
[NewsBank, Nye: We must all save the Earth, The Madison Courier, Madison, Indiana, February 21, 2009, Pat Whitney]
Odysseus, Book XI, line 846
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)
Source: Black Holes and Baby Universes
“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”
Source: 1910s, Why Men Fight https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_Men_Fight (1917), pp. 178-179
Context: Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
“More gold had been mined from the mind of men than the earth it self”
Source: Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century