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.
The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.
The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance.
To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.
The Choice, after all, is ours to make.
Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?
Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience.
Darling – I suppose the world would consider us absolutely crazy, but it is wonderful to feel that way, isn’t it? Sort of a perpetual springtime in our hearts.
I still feel there is a case to be made for my old belief that as man approaches the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ – or the space-age universe, if you will, he must do so with humility rather than with arrogance.
When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself – the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflit and eternal change.
Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.
Nowhere on the shore is the relation of a creature to its surroundings a matter of a single cause and effect; each living thing is bound to its world by many threads, weaving the intricate design of the fabric of life.
Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.
One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space.
The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.
We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.
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.
Unless we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is-whether its victim is human or animal-we cannot expect things to be much better in the world.
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.
How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?