“We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.”

Faith will not be restored in the West because people believe it to be useful. It will return only when they find that it is true.

The gaps in power, the gaps in wealth, the gaps in ideology which hold the nations apart also make up the abyss into which mankind can fall to annihilation.

the wealthy white western minority of the world could not hope to prosper if most of the rest of mankind were foundering in hopeless poverty. Islands of plenty in a vast ocean of misery never have been a good recipe for commercial success.

It is a truism that one person who wants something is a hundred times stronger than a hundred who want to be left alone.

Our physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity.

If a man has lived in a tradition which tells him that nothing can be done about his human condition, to believe that progress is possible may well be the greatest revolution of all.

Business shouldn’t be like sports, separating the men from the women.

The raw material from which social institutions are fashioned is always more or less recalcitrant and any human society will tend to produce a caricature of itself.

Jews were the first to believe that history itself has meaning and that progress, not repetition, is the law of life.

To me, one of the proofs that there is a moral governance in the universe is the fact that when people and governments work intelligently and far-sightedly for the good of others, they achieve their own prosperity, too.

Fear can indeed be the beginning of wisdom.

It is a fact of history that those who seek to withdraw from its great experiments usually end up being overwhelmed by them.

There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbour in the end.

To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.

We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that “we choose death.”

in modern society, fear of unemployment remains the darkest of the shadows thrown by the past. In an industrial order, a man out of work is almost a man out of life.

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

We see that the ecological movement, environmentalist movement, organizes all kinds of demonstrations against these.

I thought I was gonna be an attorney, so I went to Dartmouth and I was a government major and I minored in environmental policy, and I didn’t do anything academically around the arts.

I really do believe that in order to overcome our environmental shortcomings.

I truly believe that empathy is the key to solving the majority of our environmental and social problems.

I want to make it clear,if there is ever a conflict [between environmental quality and economic growth], I will go for beauty, clean air, water, and landscape.

The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter.