POLLUTION QUOTES

"This is even more evidence of the clear link between vehicle pollution and respiratory illness. We must do everything we can to take high-polluting vehicles off the road."

— Charlene Zettel

"Particulate matter pollution kills people. We're a long way from cleaning up this problem."

— Brent Newell

"The American people have a right to air that they and their children can breathe without fear."

— Lyndon Baines Johnson

"In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day."

— Lester Brown

"All of us face a variety of risks to our health as we go about our day-to-day lives.... Indoor air pollution is one risk that you can do something about."

— US EPA

"Storm water is a source of pollution, because there are pollutants in our environment that the storm water picks up."

— Larry Altose

"Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans."

— Jacques Cousteau

"We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one."

— Jacques Cousteau

"When drinking water, remember its source."

— Chinese proverb

"Every eight months, nearly 11 million gallons of oil run off our streets and driveways into our waters—the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil spill."

— America's Living Oceans [Pew Oceans Report, 2003]

"No one has the right to use America's rivers and America's waterways, that belong to all the people, as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one man or one industry or one state, but the waters which flow between the banks should belong to all the people."

— President Lyndon B. Johnson, upon signing the Clean Water Act of 1965

"The oceans are in trouble; the coasts are in trouble; our marine resources are in trouble. These are not challenges we can sweep aside."

— James Watkins, Admiral, US Navy (Ret.); as head of US Commission on Ocean Policy

"About half of the nation's waters surveyed by states do not adequately support aquatic life because of excess nutrients... Nutrients have also been associated with both the large hypoxia zone in the gulf of Mexico ... and the Pfisteria-induced fish kills and human health problems in the coastal waters of several East Coast and Gulf states."

— US EPA

"Just as there may be a time lag between [pollution] emissions and exposure, there may also be a time lag between exposure and [human or ecological] damages."

— US EPA, "Unfinished Business: A Comparative Assessment of Environmental Problems"

"If ever we had proof that our nation's pollution laws aren't working, it's reading the list of industrial chemicals in the bodies of babies who have not yet lived outside the womb."

— Louise Slaughter

"That we have children coming into this world already polluted, at the same time we don't know what the effects of that pollution will be on their mental and physical development, is both bad policy and immorally wrong."

— Louise Slaughter

"The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect."

— Rene Dubos

"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."

— R. Buckminster Fuller

"Waste equals food."

— William McDonough, author of the book Cradle to Cradle

"Pollution should never be the price of prosperity."

— Al Gore

"Pollution often disappears when we switch to renewable resources."

— David Morris

"Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life."

— Alan Dundes

"We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place."

— Gunther Grass

"[There] is an increasing sense of what can be called 'legal pollution.'"

— Thomas Ehrlich

"One of great threats facing marine mammals in the ocean is acoustic pollution—noise pollution—which is impeding the whales' ability to find food and communicate with each other."

— Brent Plater

"The idea is to return these sites to the status they were before they were polluted. That's what a cleanup is."

— Ryan Karben

"If environmental protection efforts continue to lag behind economic growth, pollution will become even more rampant."

— Zhou Shengxian

"We have realized after 50 years of tackling the pollution problem that to be [effective] we need laws, not just voluntary agreements."

— Don Henry

"Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you."

— John Muir

"It has been written that the meek shall inherit the earth. What has not been written is that they shall inherit it after the greedy and the selfish have already polluted the air, fouled the water and poisoned the food chain. The actual moral of the parable is stand up for yourself, for our planet and for all who dwell here."

— Mr. Prophet

"Erosion, desertification, and pollution have become our lot. It is a weird form of suicide, for we are bleeding our planet to death."

— Gerald Durrell

"It's not the... the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real cause of pollution, Brigadier. It's simply greed."

— Doctor Who

Please see Grinning Planet's separate page of funny quotes about pollution.