“I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.”

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

Everything is connected to everything else.

In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.

In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.

As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world – most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world’s poor.

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.

Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

Any irrational fears?no, i’m quite a rationalist. i’m not superstitious, i think life is too full of natural wonders and logical complexities to worry about illogical things.

To explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.

Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?