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Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life.
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If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.
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And so in my mind's eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality - earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.
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We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.
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I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to 'know' as to 'feel'.
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A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
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Why would anyone believe it is possible to lay down such barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.
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Only as a child's awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.
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To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.
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But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
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The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
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Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
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the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But the solution seems always to bring with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last, final mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I cherish a very unscientific hope that they will not be.
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There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life - we are never bored.
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But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.
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It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
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When any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end as natural. When that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.
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The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
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The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth - soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife.
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A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power.
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Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.
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We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.
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For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.
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Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.