“So here the twins were laid low at Aeneas' hands,
down they crashed like lofty pine trees axed.”

“So if you are the big tree, we are the small axe. Ready to cut you down, to cut you down.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

“A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe…. What a terrible future!”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

“Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever…. Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

“I was a lovely tree, in thy presence, Oscar, with all my branches round me; but thy death came like a blast from the desert, and laid my green head low.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“Lone upon a mountain, the pine-trees wailing round him,
Lone upon a mountain the Grecian youth is laid;
Sleep, mystic sleep, for many a year has bound him,
Yet his beauty, like a statue's pale and fair, is undecay'd.
When will he awaken?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

“Another's sword has laid him low,
Another's and another's;
And every hand that dealt the blow—
Ah me! it was a brother's!”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer