“Since the appearance of visible life on Earth, 380 million years had to elapse in order for a butterfly to learn how to fly; 180 million years to create a rose with no other commitment than to be beautiful; and four geological eras in order for us human beings to be able to sing better than birds, and to be able to die from love. It is not honorable for the human talent, in the golden age of science, to have conceived the way for such an ancient and colossal process to return to the nothingness from which it came through the simple act of pushing a button.”

Source: All Creatures Great and Small

Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 1 : Our Riches

What Can We Expect of the Moon?" in The American Legion Magazine, March 1965
General sources

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 75)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

as quoted in Boss Ket (1961) by Rosamond McPherson Young p. 194

Context: I just undertook over the last nine months a project with the International Monetary Fund to look at the capacity of the poorest countries to keep their children in school, make sure there are vaccines, make sure that there is basic healthcare and so forth. And the result... that a poor country cannot do that on their own resources, but what it would take from the rich countries is tiny as a fraction of our resources... If we do not help... Probably more than five million kids will die [this year] because they don’t have access to basic healthcare that could be handled by... $40 per person in the rich world, for example. Even a few billionaires could take it on their own philanthropy, basically, and do this, but we’re not doing it...

Source: Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 727
Context: The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.