Quotes about pollutant (218 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Love should not be polluted with friendship.”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

Love , Friendship

“We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

Stupidity

“We have 7 billion people on this planet. It’s not that there’s not enough room on this planet for 7 billion people, it’s that the energy needs for 7 billion people are 7 billion people’s worth of energy needs, as opposed to, say, 2 billion. Imagine how much pollution would be in the air and the oceans if there were only 2 billion people putting it in? So yeah, we’re already overpopulated.”

Morgan Freeman (1937) American actor, film director, and narrator

Source: [Stern, Marlow, Janbuary 28, 2014, Morgan Freeman on God, Satan, and How the Human Race Has ‘Become A Parasite’, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/morgan-freeman-kerry-washington-celebrate-oscars-science-at-breakthrough-prize-ceremony-1064160, The Daily Beast, New York, December 4, 2017]

People , Imagination

“It's like there's this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds upon the essence of the spirit, feeds upon the essence of the human being, the spirit. This predator energy can take fossil fuel and other resources out of the Earth, turn it into fuel, to run a machine system. But in order for there to be a need for that system, and in order for that system to work, they have to mine our minds to get at the essence of our spirit. In the same way the external mining takes place, it pollutes—we see now, people understand how it poisons the environment, the water, the air pollution—the mining of the essence, the mining of the spirit, mining our minds … the pollution from that is all the neurotic, distorted, insecure behavior patterns that we develop. That's the pollution. Because in order for this predatory system, this disease, to work, we must not be able to use our minds in a clear coherent manner. Because if we use our minds in a clear coherent manner, we will not accept the unacceptable.”

John Trudell (1946–2015) Native American rights activist, musician, poet

Columbus Day Speech, San Francisco (1992)

People , Disease , Way , Behavior

“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Sea

“Producing an animation series merely to fill time slots in the broadcast schedule is like generating cultural pollution.”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

Time , Animals

“Pollution removed his helmet and shook out his long white hair. He had taken over when Pestilence, muttering about penicillin, had retired in 1936.”

Terry Pratchett book Good Omens

Source: Good Omens

“We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

“Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Tree

“A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.”

Barry Lyga (1971) American writer

Source: I Hunt Killers

Feeling , Drink

“The only solution to pollution is a people's humane revolution.”

Bobby Seale (1936) American activist

Speech at the "Free John Sinclair" concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan (December 1971)

People

“The human being should be the absolute priority. It seems it is more important to reach the planet Mars than prevent 13 million Africans dying of hunger. Why would I want to know if there is water on Mars if we are polluting the water here on Earth, or doing nothing to avoid it? Priorities need to be redefined, but there is no chance of this, if we don't confront the need to know what democracy is.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Quoted in New African (IC Magazines Limited, 2003), p. 25.

Hunger , Democracy , Water , Chance

“This oppressor, this machine that has gone mad and run amok, it is berserk. They keep telling us, "progress.” They keep telling us “face reality.” Well, let’s deal with reality. Reality is the Earth can no longer take this attack. We can no longer allow this Thing to continue when it’s polluting the air, it’s polluting the water, polluting our food. They pollute the air, they pollute the water, they pollute our food, they pollute our minds.”

John Trudell (1946–2015) Native American rights activist, musician, poet

"We are Power" speech (1980)

Food , Reality , Water , Madness

“We have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less; we buy more but enjoy it less; we have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, yet less time; we have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgment; more experts, yet more problems; we have more gadgets but less satisfaction; more medicine, yet less wellness; we take more vitamins but see fewer results. We drink too much; smoke too much; spend too recklessly; laugh too little; drive too fast; get too angry; stay up too late; get up too tired; read too seldom; watch TV too much and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values; we fly in faster planes to arrive there quicker, to do less and return sooner; we sign more contracts only to realize fewer profits; we talk too much; love too seldom and lie too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life; we've added years to life, not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We've conquered outer space, but not inner space; we've done larger things, but not better things; we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul; we've split the atom, but not our prejudice; we write more, but learn less; plan more, but accomplish less; we make faster planes, but longer lines; we learned to rush, but not to wait; we have more weapons, but less peace; higher incomes, but lower morals; more parties, but less fun; more food, but less appeasement; more acquaintances, but fewer friends; more effort, but less success. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication; drive smaller cars that have bigger problems; build larger factories that produce less. We've become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion; tall men, but short character; steep in profits, but shallow relationships. These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare; more leisure and less fun; higher postage, but slower mail; more kinds of food, but less nutrition. These are the days of two incomes, but more divorces; these quick trips, disposable diapers, cartridge living, throw-away morality, one-night stands, overweight bodies and pills that do everything from cheer, to prevent, quiet or kill. It is a time when there is much in the show window and nothing in the stock room.”

Bob Moorehead

"The Paradox of Our Age"; these statements were used in World Wide Web hoaxes which attributed them to various authors including George Carlin, a teen who had witnessed the Columbine High School massacre, the Dalai Lama and Anonymous; they are quoted in "The Paradox of Our Time" at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/paradox.asp
Words Aptly Spoken (1995)

Love , Life , Men , Lie

“But the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth exists only in bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste and use for the purposes of his lusts—the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy—do you suppose that such a soul as this will depart pure and unalloyed?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Love , Hate , Pleasure , Truth

“I have that confidence in the common sense, I will say the common spirit of our countrymen, that I believe they will not long endure this huckstering tyranny of the Treasury Bench—these political pedlars that bought their party in the cheapest market, and sold us in the dearest. I know, Sir, that there are many who believe that the time is gone by when one can appeal to those high and honest impulses that were once the mainstay and the main element of the English character. I know, Sir, that we appeal to a people debauched by public gambling—stimulated and encouraged by an inefficient and shortsighted Minister. I know that the public mind is polluted with economic fancies; a depraved desire that the rich may become richer without the interference of industry and toil. I know, Sir, that all confidence in public men is lost. But, Sir, I have faith in the primitive and enduring elements of the English character. It may be vain now, in the midnight of their intoxication, to tell them that there will be an awakening of bitterness; it may be idle now, in the spring-tide of their economic frenzy, to warn them that there may be an ebb of trouble. But the dark and inevitable hour will arrive. Then, when their spirit is softened by misfortune, they will recur to those principles that made England great, and which, in our belief, can alone keep England great. Then, too, perchance they may remember, not with unkindness, those who, betrayed and deserted, were neither ashamed nor afraid to struggle for the "good old cause"—the cause with which are associated principles the most popular, sentiments the most entirely national—the cause of labour—the cause of the people—the cause of England.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1846/may/15/corn-importation-bill-adjourned-debate in the House of Commons (15 May 1846).
1840s

Men , People , Faith , Confidence

“Mr. President, I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution. Accepting the urgency, it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2010s, 2015, Address at the White House

Problem , Change , Future

“The theory of "defeating" opportunist elements by the ideological struggle within the Party, the theory of "overcoming" these elements within the confines of a single party, is a rotten and dangerous theory, which threatens to condemn the Party to paralysis and chronic infirmity, threatens to leave the Party a prey to opportunism, threatens to leave the proletariat without a revolutionary party, threatens to deprive the proletariat of its main weapon in the fight against imperialism. Our Party could not have emerged on to the broad highway, it could not have seized power and organised the dictatorship of the proletariat, it could not have emerged victorious from the civil war, if it had had within its ranks people like Martov and Dan, Potresov and Axelrod. Our Party succeeded in achieving internal unity and unexampled cohesion of its ranks primarily because it was able to in good time to purge itself of the opportunist pollution, because it was able to rid its ranks of the Liquidators and Mensheviks. Proletarian parties develop and become strong by purging themselves of opportunists and reformists, social-imperialists and social-chauvinists, social-patriots and social-pacifists.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Source: The Foundations of Leninism, Ch.8

War , People , Strong , Time

“Oh, yes … I'm really frightfully human and love all mankind, and all that sort of thing. Mankind is truly amusing, when kept at the proper distance. And common men, if well-behaved, are really quite useful. One is a cynick only when one thinks. At such times the herd seems a bit disgusting because each member of it is always trying to hurt somebody else, or gloating because somebody else is hurt. Inflicting pain seems to be the chief sport of persons whose tastes and interests run to ordinary events and direct pleasures and rewards of life—the animalistic or (if one may use a term so polluted with homoletick associations) worldly people of our absurd civilisation. ……. I may be human, all right, but not quite human enough to be glad at the misfortune of anybody. I am rather sorry (not outwardly but genuinely so) when disaster befalls a person—sorry because it gives the herd so much pleasure. … The natural hatefulness and loathsomeness of the human beast may be overcome only in a few specimens of fine heredity and breeding, by a transference of interests to abstract spheres and a consequent sublimation of the universal sadistic fury. All that is good in man is artificial; and even that good is very slight and unstable, since nine out of ten non-primitive people proceed at once to capitalise their asceticism and vent their sadism by a Victorian brutality and scorn towards all those who do not emulate their pose. Puritans are probably more contemptible than primitive beasts, though neither class deserves much respect.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (8 March 1923), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 211-212
Non-Fiction, Letters

Love , Life , Men , Pain

“Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards for man-made sources.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Ronald Reagan, Sierra (10 September 1980)
1980s

“It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Misattributed

Water

“I have warned you over and over that for every physical effect there is a psychic cause. You see the effect — the cause is just as visible. Can you imagine that Man is here made in the image of his Almighty, when he pollutes that which the Almighty, as it is said, has given to him when he pollutes even himself? This is not democracy, my lad, it is modern American inhumanity. This is not civilization, it is CALIBAN!”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Source: Kindergarten Chats (1918), Ch. 36 : Another City

Democracy , Imagination

“Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

"James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years" The Independent (January 16, 2006)

People , Fools

“Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people were awakening. Many leading men, Americans and Canadians, are doing all they can for the Conservation movement.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

"Our Vanishing Wildlife", in The Outlook (25 January 1913); republished in Literary Essays (vol. 12 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed., 1926), chapter 46, p. 420
1910s

Men , People , Bird , Fish

“Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts; Karl Marx has got you by the throat, and Henry Kissinger's got you tied up into knots.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979), When You Gonna Wake Up

“You trust in your own doings to appease God for your sins, and to incline the heart of God to you. Though you are poor, worthless, vile, and polluted, yet you arrogantly take upon you that very work for which the Son of God became man; and in order to which God employed four thousand years in all the great dispensations of His providence, aiming chiefly to make way for Christ's coming to do this work. This is the work that you foolishly think yourselves sufficient for; as though your prayers and performances were excellent enough for this purpose. Consider how vain is the thought which you entertain of yourself. How must such arrogance appear in the sight of Christ, whom it cost so much? It was not to be obtained even by Him, so great and glorious a person, at a cheaper rate than His wading through a sea of blood, and passing through the midst of the furnace of God's wrath.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 541.

God , Way , Thinking , Appearance

“Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

"Obstacles to Happiness", p. 78
Awareness (1992)
Context: Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don't you experience it? Because you've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!

Children , Stupidity , Nature , Happiness

“Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62

Animals , Problem , Water , Dependency

“Many US journalists and politicians acknowledge that climate change is the largest threat facing humanity, but few point to the fact that the US military is the largest institutional polluter, and emitter of carbon emissions, and every single climate treaty excludes their responsibility.”

Abby Martin (1984) American journalist

Interview https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/20/what-are-the-prospects-for-peace-an-interview-with-abby-martin/ with Counterpunch (2021)

Change

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

Reality

“It has come to my attention, that air pollution is polluting the air!”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

“One wondering thought pollutes the day”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

“Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.”

Ha-Joon Chang book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Source: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

People

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)
Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

People , Health , Books , World

“Die human, DIE!! Die nasty polluting person!!!!' yelled Grover. I turned him so he faced me. He kept on clicking his plastic gun towards me as if I was part of the game.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Game , Parting , Personality

“Blah, blah, blah. Demon boy, I can't speak that language. Furthermore, I don't want to pollute my brain by learning it. So it's time for you to learn mine. First lesson-I'm Say-been. I'm oft described as byoo-tee-full and mah-jest'ick.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Kiss of a Demon King

Boy , Learning , Time

“It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“I cannot imagine any objective finding that CO2 is a pollutant. If that's true, God is a polluter.”

Joe Barton (1949) United States congressional representative from Texas

Congress and global warming, Reprint of article by Greenwire, 2006-08-07 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/8/2/134832/8334,

God , Imagination

“We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor,…have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south…when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.”

Ross Perot (1930–2019) American businessman

1992 Presidential Debate, regarding the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Transcript http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/the-1992-campaign-transcript-of-2d-tv-debate-between-bush-clinton-and-perot.html

Money , Health , Cars , Country

“There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs, there'd be no place to put it all.”

Robert Orben (1928) American magician and writer

Reported in Robert Krier (January 31, 2008) "Waiting to Inhale: Don't take a breath without the report from our Air Pollution Control District", The San Diego Union-Tribune, p. E-1.
Attributed

“People did not proceed, as the theory of evolution really requires by demythologizing their symbolism about animals and the downward direction. Instead they resisted evolution at all costs, or accepted it with the provisio that the future was to lift them out of the degrading company that admittedly contaminated their past. The Future was seen as leading many away from the rest of nature as fast as possible, as giving him the hope of escaping continuity with it after all. Those who felt a sense of pollution at the thought of kinship with other animals could dwell on the hope of becoming less like them.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 198.

People , Hope , Nature , Sense

“When coal-fired power generation is a necessity for Taiwan, the Linkou Power Plant, equipped with the most advanced generators and pollution control and abatement systems and burning the types of coal that have the fewest impurities, is the model we look toward.”

William Lai (1959) Taiwanese politician

William Lai (2018) cited in " Premier visits coal-fired power plant to alleviate public concerns http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201803180015.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 18 March 2018.

“Pollution, defilement, squalor are words that never would have been created had man lived conformably to Nature. Birds, insects, bears die as cleanly and are disposed of as beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living…. How beautiful is all Death!”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

August or September 1875, page 222
John of the Mountains, 1938

Death , Beauty , Nature , Bird

“A crime, which, though perhaps not considered by law as the highest, is in truth and in fact, the blackest sin, which can contaminate the hands, or pollute the soul of man.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Fielding, Henry; ed. by William Ernest Henley. 1903. The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq: Miscellaneous writings. W. Heinemann. p. 162

Truth , Law , Soul

“None of the heroes prepared for suffering and sacrifice, none of the common herd ready for service and obedience, will be inclined to listen to the call of their country once they discover the polluted sources from whence that call proceeds and recognize the monstrous finger of falsehood which beckons them to the battlefield.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction

Suffering , Country

“If all fossil fuels and their derivatives, as well as trees for paper and construction were banned in order to save the planet, reverse the Greenhouse Effect and stop deforestation; then there is only one known annually renewable natural resource that is capable of providing the overall majority of the world's paper and textiles; meet all of the world's transportation, industrial and home energy needs, while simultaneously reducing pollution, rebuilding the soil, and cleaning the atmosphere all at the same time… and that substance is -- the same one that did it all before -- Cannabis Hemp… Marijuana!”

Jack Herer (1939–2010) American Cannabis/Hemp and freedom activist

Jack Herer's The Emperor Wears No Clothes (1993), from the book's back cover

World , Home , Nature , Tree

“I believe honestly and deeply that the treatment of whales is an example of the evil intelligence of humankind in relation to the rest of the natural world. We have seen greed of the most impossible kind descending on the Arctic and the Antarctic to destroy the most intelligent and beautiful creatures that the planet can produce…We are in the process of destroying much of the planet through destruction of the ozone layer, leading to the greenhouse effect, and the destruction of life. The whale is an example of how such destruction happens. As the ozone layer is destroyed the plankton in the Southern ocean will die and the whales will lose much of their food. Last year we opposed the Antarctic Minerals Bill because we feared that it would lead to pollution of the Southern ocean and damage the whales' food supply. The Government must oppose any extension of whaling of any type, scientific or otherwise, and I hope and trust that they will do so. But we must go further. Countries which engage in the barbarity of so-called scientific whaling, which in reality is crude commercialism of the nastiest kind, deserve retribution from us all and we must bring every possible sanction to bear against them. If we do not take care of our planet and our environment, and of animals such as the whale, mankind will suffer and our planet will die because we have not cared for the natural environment that we all share.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/mar/02/whaling in the House of Commons (2 March 1990).
1990s

Life , World , Fear , Food

“The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words.”

Charles Sumner (1811–1874) American abolitionist and politician

"The Crime against Kansas," speech in the Senate (May 18, 1856). The claims made against Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina so angered Butler's cousin, Democrat Representative Preston Brooks, that Brooks assaulted Sumner with a cane in the Senate chamber a few weeks later

Love , Books , World , Courage

“It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Commencement Address at the University of Southern California (March 17, 1970).
Other

Hunger , Dreams , Thinking

“I started freerunning when I was 16. It just felt like an evolution of what I always wanted to do as a child: be creative, climb on things. It let me apply an adult mentality to that playfulness. Then I was introduced to veganism. And from there, I found out that the biggest percentage of pollution on the planet comes from animal agriculture. Once I discovered that, it became my calling. I think we all have something to contribute; we just have to look at the bigger picture and ask, “With what we’ve been given, what message can we promote that helps the greater good?””

Tim Shieff (1988) American freerunner

"Go veggie to save the planet, says world champion freerunner Tim Shieff" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/16/go-veggie-to-save-the-planet-says-world-champion-freerunner-tim-shieff, interview with The Guardian (16 June 2015).

Thinking , Help , Animals

“We have to consider that the foods we ingest let a certain amount of soluble toxic substances dispersed in the environment into our bodies. These polluting substances are harmful if we breathe them in, but they are even more so if we ingest them. By consuming meat, we put ourselves precisely in that position, because such substances in the atmosphere fall back to Earth, and hence, onto the grass that, when eaten by cattle, introduces harmful substances into their adipose deposits and therefore into their flesh, and finally, onto our plates.”

Umberto Veronesi (1925–2016) Italian oncologist and politician

The First Day Without Cancer (2013)

Food , Grass

“If someone is frequently under attack by negative entities, it is because of a polluted consciousness that needs to be upgraded. A negative entity dislikes visiting a clean mind as much as a rat dislikes going to a clean place. […] Putting up spiritual paraphernalia around the home and not allowing any negative activity to go on in the environment can help you greatly. This may mean asking friends and loved ones to refrain from drinking, smoking, taking drugs, gossiping, or doing any activity that does not encourage spiritual thought and action.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 22

Love , Home , Drink , Help

“[W]e do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn't seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends into further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past […]. I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemma.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Shoemaker and Morning Star", pp. 206–207
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Age , Color , Time , Past

“France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted as we at present are, and are for the future to be. But then, in return, we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least, wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us to offend her;”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Essais (1595), Book I

Law , Soul , Passion , Future

“Purposes fraught with horror, that shun the light, and contemplate the pollution of innocence are here engendered, and fostered, and reared to maturity.”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Light

“It’s hard to explain the cost and consequences of environmental pollution and destruction to a six year old. But we are paying a desperate price even now because adults did not heed the instructions of kindergarten: Clean up your own mess; put things back where you found them; don’t take what’s not yours.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986)

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life , Truth , School , Law

“Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

As quoted in Margaret Mead: A Life (1984) by Jane Howard; cited in Journey Through Womanhood : Meditations from Our Collective Soul (2002) by Tian Dayton, p. 46
1980s

Love , Dance

“The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Detective Roberts, in Ch. 8
An American Dream (1965)

Men , World , Cry

“The practical effects of the Marxian-Federovian cult of technology were ruinous. Inspired by a materialist philosophy, the Soviet Union inflicted more far-reaching and lasting damage on the material environment than any regime in history. Green earth became desert, and pollution rose to life-threatening levels. No advantage to mankind was gained by the Soviet destruction of nature. Soviet citizens lived no longer than people in other countries - many of them a good deal less.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: Nikolai Federov, Bolshevism and the Technological Pursuit of Immortality (p. 138)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life , People , History , Nature

“To confess to freedom, the highest habit;
while so many are courting the powerful and look from below
to the tyrants slowly crossing through the town,
longing in envy to be seen in the crowd
and to narrate their parenthood.
Better to look on in serenity:
the noise of triumph is like a polluted river.
Better to decide and to act, at the service of the ready heart
and oppose the anonymous world,
uniting the individuals ever more in the * “thou.””

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

World , Freedom , Heart , Envy

“As a writer you will know that one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is, a character's told 'you've got three months to live,' and who would you kill? I call my cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do…) I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

"The Long Goodbye," The Guardian (6 April 1994); the quote is from Potter's final television interview with Melvyn Bragg (5 April 1994)

Life , Reality , Time , Parting

“Al Gore could really pollute a bathroom … Just look at the guy. If someone doesn't take away his pork 'n' beans, he's bound to get another one of those 'gut feelings' and mistake his own greenhouse gas production for science!”

Rachel Marsden (1974) journalist

Toronto Sun column
cited in Fox's Ann Coulter 2.0 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/29/marsden/index.html. Salon.com.

Guy , Feeling , Science

“No one can buy his share of "clean air" in the market; one has to use communal mechanisms in order to deal with pollution.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 5, Unstable America, p. 196

Communication

“… in economic political discussions there is a nearly infinite number of specific questions that may be asked. Besides the ones mentioned in section 3 consider for instance these: "Should we build a road between points A and B in the country?", "Should we promote investments that will give employment to many people, or should we on the contrary promote such investment which will save labour?"… "Should we put more emphasis on things that have up to now not been included in the statistical concept of the gross national product? For instance, should we try to avoid air-pollution and all the kinds of intoxications that may be caused by refuse and waste (a problem that must be studied in its totality as a problem of circulation of matter in society, much in the same way as we study interindustry relations in an input-output table)?“, “Should we assess economic value to an undisturbed nature?””

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

etc.
Source: 1970s and later, From Utopian Theory to Practical Applications, 1970, p. 29

People , Way , Question , Nature

“The new Republican party. Accountability last. If ever. That is the Republican party. Now I am confident we progressives, we liberals, can change this, but it's gonna take a lot of work and we can hustle it along faster: you know the universe does tilt towards justice eventually, but we can make it tilt faster if we continue to work together in Democratic circles, liberal circles, progressive circles, libertarian circles, and true conservative circles to try and change the type of people we elect and the type of news media we have and the type of pundits we allow to pollute our airwaves. Myself included. I shouldn't be a pundit. I don't know why I am, but they asked me to, and once your name is in the rolodex, you're in. So sometimes I go on -yeah I stink. I'm a stinky pundit! …well, compared to the pundits they have I'm fantastic! But in the real world, I stink, and should not be a pundit.”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

Majority Report, April 21, 2005 broadcast
Majority Report

People , World , Justice , Confidence

“I think the subject of race has been so difficult and so polluted by malign ideas that most people have just left it alone, including geneticists. … Most genetic variation is neutral – it doesn't do anything for or against the phenotype, and evolution ignores it – so most previous attempts to look at race have concluded that there's little difference between races. I think this position is the one on which the social scientists are basing their position. … If you look at the genes that do make a difference, selected genes, which are a tiny handful of the whole, you do find a number of differences, not very many, but a number of interesting differences between races as to which genes have been selected. This, of course, makes a lot of sense, because once the human family dispersed from its homeland in Africa, people faced different environments on each continent, different climates, different evolutionary challenges, and each group adapted to its environment in its own way.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

"An interview with Nicholas Wade" http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/nicholas-wade, American Scientist (April 2006).

People , Family , Way , Idea

“The Jew is contrary to our being. … He desecrated our people, spat on our ideals, paralyzed the strength of the nation, made our customs rotten, and polluted the morale.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Der Jude ist uns im Wesen entgegengesetzt. … Er hat unser Volk geschändet, unsere Ideale besudelt, die Kraft der Nation gelähmt, die Sitten angefault und die Moral verdorben.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

People

“Excuse me Mr.
But isn't that your oil in the sea?
And the pollution in the air Mr.
Whose could that be?So excuse me Mr.
But I'm a mister too
And you're givin' Mr. a bad name,
Mr. like you.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Excuse Me Mr.
Song lyrics, Fight for Your Mind (1995)

Sea

“Unlawful revenue which, after being conveniently cleaned, is then reinvested within the legal economy: polluting it, corrupting it, forging it, killing it. Whether it’s reinvested in the London property market, in Parisian restaurants, or in hostels on the; to have profited from the crisis, to have fed on the crisis, to have contributed to the crisis. And it’s in the crisis that it finds its satellite activities, such as usury, gambling, counterfeiting. But the most important – and most alarming – aspect of this issue is that it’s exactly in times of crisis that criminal organisations find their safe haven in banks.”

Roberto Saviano (1979) Italian journalist, writer and essayist

Dirty Money in London event (2016)

Time

“It's a terrible paradox that we march toward a virtual Eden when there is still time to reverse pollution and find it again in nature.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

(21 December 2017) http://lorinrichards.weebly.com

Nature , Time

“The Communists were promising retirement for all state employees at age 35. The Socialists were proposing absolutely nothing because they couldn't elect a leader who would propose things. The centre-right parties (of which there were about ten) were all promising employers that they would no longer have to pay workers and would be exempt from prosecution for any industrial pollution that killed fewer than 100,000 people. The far right was proposing, less realistically, to have immigrants barbecued in every place du marché on Friday nights. And in a similar vein, the rural party promised to change the law on endangered species so that hunters could now shoot dodos, unicorns, mermaids and American tourists.”

Stephen Clarke book A Year in the Merde

on political parties in France before an election:
A Year in the Merde (2005)

People , Age , Law , Change

“Goodbye, from the world's biggest polluter.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Concluding a private address at the Tokyo G8 summit; July 12, 2008; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2277298/President-George-Bush-'Goodbye-from-the-world's-biggest-polluter'.html
2000s, 2008

World

“The Amír marched out towards Lamghan, which is a city celebrated for its great strength and abounding in wealth. He conquered it and set fire to the places in its vicinity which were inhabited by infidels, and demolishing the idol-temples, he established Islam in them. He marched and captured other cities and killed the polluted wretches, destroying the idolatrous and gratifying the Musulmans. After wounding and killing beyond all measure, his hands and those of his friends became cold in counting the value of the plundered property. On the completion of his conquest he returned and promulgated accounts of the victories obtained for Islam, and every one, great and small, concurred in rejoicing over this result and thanking Allah.”

Sabuktigin (942–997) Founder of the Ghaznavid Empire

Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume II, p. 22. Translation of Tarikh-i-Yamini of al-Utbi.

Victory , Wealth

“Well, if Evolution is true […] you’re just a bit of protoplasm that washed up on the beach. Matter of fact, you’re part of the problem because you’re one of the polluters of the environment and the more of you we can get rid of, the better. And by the way folks, if Evolution is true, that is normal thinking. Get rid of humanity because we’re the problem. But if Creation is true, we’re the purpose of this creation. God did it for us.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

God , Way , Problem , Thinking

“Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain…in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of space?”

Italo Svevo book Zeno's Conscience

La vita attuale è inquinata alle radici. L'uomo s'è messo al posto degli alberi e delle bestie ed ha inquinata l'aria, ha impedito il libero spazio. Può avvenire di peggio. Il triste e attivo animale potrebbe scoprire e mettere al proprio servizio delle altre forze. V'è una minaccia di questo genere in aria. Ne seguirà una grande chiarezza... nel numero degli uomini. Ogni metro quadrato sarà occupato da un uomo. Chi ci guarirà dalla mancanza di aria e di spazio?
Source: La coscienza di Zeno (1923), P. 364; p. 436.

Life , Sadness , Tree , Animals

“On a personal level, I chose not to look at the eclipse but rather sat outside during it and listened and appreciated nature, instead of participating in it like a pop festival. My decision was based partly on belief but also I have to contemplate the mass production of glasses and how they will only be used once, polluting our earth with plastics and harmful metals.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Speaking about the solar eclipse on August 21, 2017.

Nature , Decision , Personality

“When a man reproached him for going into unclean places, he said, "The sun too penetrates into privies, but is not polluted by them."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Diogenes, 6.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 6: The Cynics

Sun

“Contempt for science could perhaps depend on the fact that, science hasn’t been able to solve any of our basic problems, for example the environmental pollution or the problems with HIV and AIDS. This is the worst disease of our time, and scientists are lost. I believe that many people are disappointed with science when the answers we need are not delivered.”

Björn Ulvaeus (1945) Swedish musician

Björn Ulvaeus Speaks on Humanism, 14 July 2006

People , Disease , Disappointment , Problem

“Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

Bettencourt, L. M., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C., & West, G. B. (2007). " Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.long." Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 104(17), 7301–7306.
2000s

People , Disease , History , Wealth

“Without this form of social technology, the industrialized countries of the West could not have reached the heights of extravagance, wealth and pollution that they currently enjoy.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 5; Talking about bureaucracy

Country , Wealth

“I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate--tried finally to take from us the crust.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

Life , People , Hope , Way

“In Gaia, there's no such thing as pollution. The rules of the game are that any species that produces something noxious that affects the environment, is doomed. Imagine there's some green bug… that decides it would be a neat trick to make chlorine. That bug is not going to succeed. If it doesn't kill itself off, it will certainly kill off its progeny, and destroy the environment around it and have no food to eat.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

Food , Imagination , Game

“For he who reckons it a pleasure that a man, though justly condemned, should be slain in his sight, pollutes his conscience as much as if he should become a spectator and a sharer of a homicide which is secretly committed.”
Nam qui hominem, quamuis ob merita damnatum, in conspectu suo iugulari pro uoluptate computat, conscientiam suam polluit, tam scilicet, quam si homicidii, quod fit occulte, spectator et particeps fiat.

Lactantius (250–325) Early Christian author

Book VI, Chap. XX
The Divine Institutes (c. 303–13)

Pleasure

“We have been living in an ideological bubble — one of market fundamentalism.From the trauma of the Great Depression to 1973, there was a broad consensus across the democratic world that markets were absolutely essential to generate wealth, but they will also cause all sorts of problems if they are left unregulated. Economists like JM Keynes and JK Galbraith taught us that if you abolish markets, you get starvation; but if you abolish all the democratic checks and balances on markets, you get a system that eats itself. Unregulated businesses will cause unsustainable levels of pollution and inequality, and ultimately start pursuing unhinged business models that cause the whole system to collapse.”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

"Has Market Fundamentalism Had Its Day?" http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1269, The Independent (2008-03-20).

World , Business , Problem , Wealth

“Sacredness is the essence of religion. You know, a great river may become polluted as it flows past a town, but if the pollution isn’t too great, the river cleanses itself as it goes along, and within a few miles it is again clean, fresh, pure. Similarly, when once the mind comes upon this sacredness, then every act is a cleansing act. Through its very movement the mind is making itself innocent, and therefore it is not accumulating. A mind that has discovered this sacredness is in constant revolution — not economic or social revolution, but an inner revolution through which it is endlessly purifying itself. Its action is not based on some idea or formula. As the river, with a tremendous volume of water behind it, cleanses itself as it flows, so does the mind cleanse itself when once it has come upon this religious sacredness.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Vol. XV, p. 244
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

Religion , Idea , Water , Past

“It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation. My prison-house environment is but another manifestation of the Midas-hand, whose cursed touch turns everything to the brutal service of Mammon.”

Alexander Berkman book Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), Ch. 18: "The Solitary".

Housing

“Since Hedorah was supposed to be a monster created by pollution instead of an animal, I tried to avoid portraying him as an animal. I tried to make him seem spooky and grotesque.”

Kenpachiro Satsuma (1947) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview I" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1993)

Animals

“It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:, br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc.,
all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 15-16

Dreams , Idea , Question , Problem

“We discussed education and culture and how we can inculcate values. The other issue was pollution of ideology, national ideology…Some people alleged that we are doing saffronisation. If at all saffronisation has been done, it has been done by the public of India. We accept the mandate of the people.”

Mahesh Sharma (1959) Indian politician

On saffronisation, as quoted in " 'Saffronisation' Done by Public When They Gave Mandate to BJP: Mahesh Sharma http://www.outlookindia.com/news/article/saffronisation-done-by-public-when-they-gave-mandate-to-bjp-mahesh-sharma/912013" Outlook (7 September 2015)

People , Education

“They (the Hindus) differ from us in religion… There is very little disputing about theological topics among themselves; at the most they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy. … in all manners and usages they differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their children with us… and as to declare us to be devil’s breed and our doings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper, …. they call all foreigners as mleccha, i. e. impure, and forbid having any connection with them, be it by intermarriage or any other kind of relationship, or by sitting, eating, and drinking with them, because thereby they think, they would be polluted… They are not allowed to receive anybody who does not belong to them, even if he wished it, or was inclined to their religion.”

Al-Biruni (973–1048) Persian scholar and polymath

Alberuni, I, pp.19-20. quoted from K.S. Lal, Indian Muslims who are they, 1990
From Alberuni's India

Children , Religion , Soul , Drink

“For the moment we will put aside the consideration of the effect upon others — which is so infinitely more important — and think only of the results for the man himself. It is necessary to do this because one of the objections frequently brought against vegetarianism is that it is a beautiful theory, but one the working of which is impracticable, since it is supposed that a man cannot live without devouring dead flesh. That objection is irrational, and is founded upon ignorance or perversion of facts. I am myself an example of its falsity; for I have lived without the pollution of flesh food — without meat, fish or fowl — for the last thirty-eight years, and I not only still survive, but have been during all that time in remarkably good health. Nor am I in any way peculiar in this, for I know some thousands of others who have done the same thing. I know some younger ones who have been so happy as to be unpolluted by the eating of flesh during the whole of their lives; and they are distinctly freer from disease than those who partake of such things.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913), p. 4-5

Health , Disease , Food , Beauty

“The right hon. Gentleman should be aware that, two weeks ago, I had an interesting meeting with an environmental campaigning group from the Soviet Union who openly admitted that the industrial policies followed in the past by the Soviet Union and many countries in central and eastern Europe had done a great deal of environmental damage. The difference is that those people felt that they had the power to change the policies to stop the destruction of their own environment. The policies of free-market economies which the right hon. Gentleman propounds have led to the pollution of the North sea and the Irish sea, the destruction of the rain forests in Brazil and Malaysia and long-term serious environmental damage by multinational companies all over the southern countries of this planet.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/dec/15/future-of-socialism in the House of Commons (15 December 1989).
1980s

People , Change , Past , Sea

“Apollonius accordingly paused for a minute and then, fixing his eyes, as it were, on the discourse he had heard, he spoke as follows: "… I am not come here to ask your advice about how to live, insomuch as I long ago made choice of the life which seemed best to myself … For I discerned a certain sublimity in the discipline of Pythagoras, and how a certain secret wisdom enabled him to know, not only who he was himself, but also who he had been; and I saw that he approached the altars in purity, and suffered not his belly to be polluted by partaking of the flesh of animals and that he kept his body pure of all garments woven of dead animal refuse; and that he was the first of mankind to restrain his tongue, inventing a discipline of silence … I also saw that his philosophical system was in other respects oracular and true. So I ran to embrace his teachings …"”

Philostratus book Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Book 6, § 11.
Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Life , Wisdom , Secret , Silence

“The study's leaders claim to have bona fide research — I say "bonified" probably here — bonified research that says the average size of a penis is roughly 10% smaller than it was 50 years ago, and the researchers say air pollution is why. Air pollution, global warming has been shown to negatively impact penis size, Italian researchers. I don't buy this, I think it's feminism. If it's tied to the last 50 years — the average size of a member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years — it has to be the feminazis, the chickification and everything else. Give 'em time and they'll blame Bush. Give 'em time. But air pollution vs. feminazis? Ha!”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

The Rush Limbaugh Show
2012-09-20
Radio, quoted in [2012-09-20, Limbaugh: Penises Now '10 Percent Smaller' and Shrinking Because of 'Feminazis', David, Crooks and Liars, http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/limbaugh-penises-now-10-percent-smaller-and-]

Thinking , Study , Time

“My father once told me that the art of receiving a compliment is, of all things, the sign of a civilized man. He died soon afterwards, leaving my education in this important matter sadly incomplete; I'm only glad that, on this, the occasion of the rarest compliment he ever could have dreamed of, that he isn't here to see his son so publicly at a loss. In receiving a compliment, or in trying to, the words are all worn out by now. They're polluted by ham and corn. And, when you try to scratch around for some new ones, it's just an exercise in empty cleverness. What I feel this evening, is not very clever. it's the very opposite of emptiness. The corny old phrase is the only one I know to say it: my heart is full; with a full heart, with all of it, I thank you. This is Samuel Johnson, on the subject of what he calls contrarieties: "there are goods, so opposed that we cannot seize both, and, in trying, fail to seize either. Flatter not yourself, he says, with contrarieties. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice. No man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source, and from the mouth of the nile." For this business of contrarieties has to do with us. With you, who are paying me this compliment, and for me, who has strayed so far from this hometown of ours. Not that I am alone in this, or unique, I am never that; but there are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of us who still trudge stubbornly along this lonely rocky road; and this is in fact our contrariety. We don't move nearly as fast as our cousins on the freeway; we don't even get as much accomplished just as the family sized farm can't possibly raise as many crops or get as much profit as the agricultural factory of today. What we do come up with has no special right to call itself better it's just.. different. No if there's any excuse for us it all, it's that we're simply following the old American tradition of the maverick, and we are a vanishing breed. This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. And also, as a tribute to the generosity of all the rest of you; to the givers, to the ones with fixed addresses. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way, or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work (in other words I'm crazy). But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or, if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn't have been mine. The truth is I don't believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it wasn't for this: my own, particular, contrariety. Let us raise our cups, then, standing as some of us do on opposite ends of the river, to what really matters to us all: to our crazy, beloved profession, to the movies — to good movies, to every possible kind.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given upon his acceptance of the AFI Lifetime Achievement award. Viewable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXJnxClGamA&list=HL1349840607&feature=mh_lolz

Life , Truth , World , Education

“Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution,
She lives whom we call dead.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Resignation

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Resignation

Dead

“Nothing mankind had done in its short and bloody history had made the slightest bit of difference to this patient geographical realignment.
Meanwhile the Earth, left to its own devices, had deployed a variety of healing mechanisms, physical, chemical, biological, and geological, to recover from the devastating interventions of its human inhabitants. Air pollutants had been broken up by sunlight and dispersed. Bog ore had absorbed much metallic waste. Vegetation had recolonized abandoned landscapes, roots breaking up concrete and asphalt, overgrowing ditches and canals. Erosion by wind and water had caused the final collapse of the last structures, washing it all into sand.
Meanwhile the relentless processes of variation and selection had worked to fill an empty world.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 18 “The Kingdom of the Rats” section II (p. 579)

World , History , Water