“With chemicals, it’s shoot first and ask questions later.”

Before Alar, there was EDB, a potent human carcinogen allowed in the grain supply and other food for more than a decade after it was known to be dangerous.

Trust the government? Why should we?

Yet is still allowed in potatoes and bananas at levels exposing up to 80,000 children a day to what EPA itself says are unacceptable high risks.

The reality of life is that we are exposed to a multiplicity of toxic substances.

There was heptachlor, linked to leukemia, and aldicarb, which poisoned thousands of California watermelons.

All of it! – was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn’t see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

War with poison and chemicals was not so rare in the ancient world.

An astounding panoply of toxic substances, venomous creatures, poison plants, animals and insects, deleterious environments, virulent pathogens, infectious agents, noxious gases, and combustible chemicals were marshalled to defeat foes.

Life itself is but the expression of a sum of phenomena, each of which follows the ordinary physical and chemical laws.

He was absorbed in disentangling the riddles of the universe, at first chemical riddles, in later periods, physical riddles.

Chemical weapons are something that scares everybody.

I’ve been putting out the fire with gasoline.

A neighborhood friend showed me how it was possible to go to a camera shop and pick up chemicals for pennies literally and develop your own film and make prints.