Along the way I have read some things that make me
think a bit about where we're all headed, and here is where they've landed. I hope you all will take something with you
that you hadn't known, realized, or thought about much before.
This stuff is important, people.
You've got the power.
-Sarah
|purposed acts and judgements|quotes, etc.|additions|
We travel together,
passengers in a little
spaceship, dependent
upon its vulnerable
reserves of air and soil;
all committed for our
savety to its security
and peace; perserved
for annihilation only by
the care, the work and,
I will say, the love we
give our fragile craft, we
cannot maintain it half
fortunate, half miserable,
half confident half despairing,
half slave to the ancient
enemies of man, half free
in a liberation of resources
undreamed of until this day.
No craft, no crew can
travel safely with such vast
contradictions. On their
resolution depends the
survival of us all.
That's the first thing to
do: control the population
in affluent white America,
where a child born to a
white American will use
about fifty times the resources
of a child born in the black ghetto.
-David Brower
Unlike plagues of the dark ages
or contemporary diseases we do
not yet understand, the modern
plague of overpopulation is soluble
by means we have discovered and
with resources we posess. What is
lacking is not sufficient knowledge
of the solution but the universal
consciousness of the gravity of the
problem and education of the billions
who are its victims.
Each year the US wastes more
fuel than most of mankind uses.
-Dennis Hayes
Once a bright hope shared by
all mankind, including myself, the
rash proliferation of atomic-power
plants has become one of the
ugliest clouds overhanging America.
-David Lilienthal
The world is threatened by growing
population, but it is also, even perhaps
to a greater extent, threatened by the
exploding appetites of the already rich.
-Maurice Strong
Much of the water supply
that we go to such great
trouble to purify--about half
of it, in fact--is only used to
carry off sewage from our
toilets. Then we go to great
further expense just to repurify
the same water.
-Neil Seldman
There is no quiet
place in the white
man's cities. No
place to hear the
leaves of spring or
the rustle of insects'
wings....
-Chief Sealth
the sense of helplessness, the
sense of not knowing, the fright,
the confusion, the notion that
there's a "juggernaut" or "combine,"
makes it extremely difficult for one
to develop one's own innate capacity
for growth, for self-healing. Survival
becomes the goal, not aliveness.
-Leonard Duhl, M.D.
Take not too much of a land,
wear not out of the fatness,
but leave in it some heart.
-Pliny The Elder
There is, one knows not what sweet
mystery about this sea, whose gently
awful stirrings seem to speak of some
hidden soul beneath...
-Herman Melville
Someone once suggested
that for every child born a
tree be planted; for every
automobile sold, a thousand,
and for every jet airliner built,
a hundred thousand.
-William Bronson
Today we make the machine the
standard for everything. Among
the most admired, the most
successful, the most envied men
are those who in manner resemble
machines; men who are efficient,
punctual, serious, standardized...
who can harness the power of
nature and turn it into wealth. We
think like the Sioux, only we think
about different things. We imitate
the machine. He imitated the buffalo.
-Stanley Vestal
More than 100,000 small farmers
are going out of business every year.
Only 2.88 million farm operators remain,
of whom 1.5 million earn less than
poverty-level incomes. As the exodus
grows, hundreds of once flourishing small
towns are shriveling. Dying.
-James M. Pierce
Gentle, withdrawing, but without permanently,
she backed out of people's lives, turning aside
from offers of friendship, from urgency, intensity,
the admiration of men who did not know her to
all. She liked all these people well enough, she
just did not to be close to them.
-Joyce Carol Oates, Bodies
In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it,
is as plain as the way to the market. It
depends chiefly on two words, industry and
frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money,
but make the best use of both.
-Benjamin Franklin, 1748
I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed.
Looking glass is dead. Toohulhusote is
dead. The old men are all dead. It is the
young men who say yes and no. He who
led the young men is dead. It is cold and
we have no blankets. The little children
have no blankets, no food. No one knows
where they are--perhaps they are freezing to
death. I want to have time to look at my
children and see how many of them I can
find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.
Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. My heart is
sad and sick. From where the sun now stands
I shall fight no more forever.
-Chief Joseph
surrender speach
As a colored woman i cannot visit
the tomb of the father of this country,
which owes its very existence to the
love of freedom in the human heart
and which stands for equal opportunity
to all, without being forced to sit in the
Jim Crow section of an electric car which
starts from the very heart of the city--midway
between the capitol and the White House.
-Mary Church Terrell, 1907
You know at twenty I signed on
to serve my country for the duration
of the war on poverty and injustice
and oppression, and I take it...that it
will last out my life and yours and our
children's lives.
-Florence Kelley, 1910
I believe a great many suffragists,
who are not pacifists, felt decidedly
aggrieved that their services had been
so lightly pledged to a government which
has denied to them for forty years a
fundamental democratic right.
-Crystal Eastman, 1917
Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather,
all over the earth the faces of living things
are all alike. With tenderness have these
come up out of the ground. Look upon
these faces of children without number
and with children in their arms, that they
may face the winds and walk the good
road to the day of quiet. This is my prayer;
hear me! The voice I have sent is weak,
yet with earnestness I have sent it. Hear me!
-Black Elk, A Prayer, 1930
It's still the same old story,
A fight for love and glory...
-As Time Goes By, song
[Women] don't assert their 