Quotes about smog

A collection of quotes on the topic of smog, likeness, city, angels.

Quotes about smog

“The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L. A.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

Hell, Sun

“Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 16 (p. 215)

“People get accustomed to evil like they get accustomed to smog or noise or graffiti! But it doesn’t change what it is.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Source: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004), Chapter 34 “On Good, Evil, Invisible Hands, and the Wind” (p. 192)

People, Evil, Change

“Every generation of Americans since has had to reenact the loss of our innocence. Smog over L. A. was the loss of our innocence. Vietnam was the loss of our innocence. Gettysburg was the loss of our innocence. Ingrid Bergman’s baby was the loss of our innocence. Oklahoma City was the loss of our innocence. The World Trade Center was the loss of our innocence. Other nations are cynical. America has preferred the child’s game of “discovering” evil—Europe’s or Asia’s, her grandfather’s, even her own.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

World, Game, Evil, Loss

“Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

The Objectivist February 1971

Life, Death, Nature

“Bob Crosby: That's like keeping the smog and throwing away Los Angeles.”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)

Angels

“New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.”

Norman Mailer book Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Pt. 2, p. 83
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

World, Angels, Game, Past

“Now all that was left 'neath the bad-smelling sky
was my big empty factory…
the Lorax…
and I.
The Lorax said nothing.
Just gave me a glance,
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance,
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks with the one word:
UNLESS.”

Dr. Seuss The Lorax

Whatever that meant . . . well, I just couldn't guess.
The Lorax (1971)

Sadness, Forgetting

“I don't mean any disrespect. I truly don't. But Texas isn't nature. Texas is city and smog and humidity and heat.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Nature

“Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil market. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the high peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's attacks on science and the law have put something even greater at risk. Americans need to recognize that we are facing not just a threat to our environment but to our values, and to our democracy.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).

Life, Law, Democracy, Home

“We played against each other like puppets, swearing you got pull
When the only pull you got is the wool over your eyes
Getting knowledge in jail like a blessing in disguise
Look in the skies for god, what you see besides the smog
Is broken dreams flying away on the wings of the obscene.”

Talib Kweli (1975) American rapper

Respiration (track 11)
Albums, Blackstar (1998)

God, Dreams, Knowledge, Flying

“The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Love, Children, Time, Housing

“It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Goldenboy (1988), p.132

Dreams, Angels, Cars, Tree