Industrial Plants Quotes

I woke up one day to the fact that the earth's surface was made for living plants, not industrial plants, ~ Malcolm Wells

Despite the dazzling successes of modern technology and the unprecedented power of modern military systems, they suffer from a common and catastrophic fault. While providing us with a bountiful supply of food, with great industrial plants, with high-speed transportation, and with military weapons of unprecedented power, they threaten our very survival. ~ Barry Commoner

On the east side of the street, the dark old factories - Civil War factories, foundries, brassworks, heavy-industrial plants blackened from the chimneys pumping smoke for a hundred years - were windowless now, the sunlight sealed out with brick and mortar, their exits and entrances plugged with cinderblock. These were the factories where people had lost fingers and arms and got their feet crushed and their faces scalded, where children once labored in the heat and the cold, the nineteenth-century factories that churned up people and churned out goods and now were unpierceable, airtight tombs. It was Newark that was entombed there, a city that was not going to stir again. The pyramids of Newark: as huge and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty's burial edifice has every historical right to be. ~ Philip Roth

The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures. ~ Winona LaDuke

My company has had a safety program for 150 years. The program was instituted as a result of a French law requiring an explosives manufacturer to live on the premises with his family. ~ Crawford Greenwalt

Limitation of scope, however, could represent a profound advantage from an ecological point of view. The sun, the wind and the earth are experiential realities to which men have responded sensuously and reverently from time immemorial. Out of these primal elements man developed his sense of dependence on - and respect for - the natural environment, a dependence that kept his destructive activities in check. The Industrial Revolution and the urbanized world that followed obscured nature's role in human experience - hiding the sun with a pall of smoke, blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating the earth with sprawling cities. Man's dependence on the natural world became invisible; it became theoretical and intellectual in character, the subject matter of textbooks, monographs and lectures. True, this theoretical dependence supplied us with insights (partial ones at best) into the natural world, but its onesidedness robbed us of all sensuous dependence on and all visible contact and unity with nature. In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves as feeling beings. We became alienated from nature. Our technology and environment became totally inanimate, totally synthetic - a purely inorganic physical milieu that promoted the deanimization of man and his thought. ~ Murray Bookchin

My other big mistake was letting it slide when she promised me a cut of her earnings. Because it turns out not many people want to stroll through head-high piles of scrap metal and rusty baby buggies down a path lined with artificial yucca plants to have their fortune told by a chain-smoking butterball in a dirty pink sweat suit. If I had thought about it long and hard enough I could've predicted that myself. ~ Kerry-Lee Powell

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting - to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture. ~ Michael Pollan

If the auto plants in Detroit would just sit around the table and say, 'What do we gotta do to make this thing work?' Instead of, 'I want this and I want that.' They might make it. ~ Richard DeVos

after you've pulled off the tablecloth with
the full plates of food
and broken the windows
and rung the bells of
idiots
and have
spoken true and terrible
words
and have
chased the mob through the
doorway-
then comes the great and
peaceful moment: sitting alone
and
pouring that quiet drink.

the world is better without
them.

only the plants and the animals are
true comrades.

I drink to them and with
them.

they wait as I fill their
glasses. ~ Charles Bukowski

The sheer mystery and majesty of heritage wisdom, contained in each cell, each mitochondria, instills in the farmer who respects and honors the pigness of the pig a daily emotional high. The satisfaction of being nature's nurturer always trumps the short-lived adrenaline high of being nature's conqueror. Such an attitude offers spiritual ascendance over physical domination, which never really happens anyway. And that's why the industrial farmer, for all the smoke and noise and horsepower, never feels in control, but always dreads being drowned by the nature he thinks he's controlling. ~ Joel Salatin

Every thought, word, and action plants seeds in the garden of your life. Are you planting seeds of love, compassion, peace, or those of anger, resentment and dissatisfaction? Choose wisely and tend your garden well. ~ John Bruna

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest. ~ Wendell Berry

As I head inside, I get smacked with the scent of industrial cleanser mixed with Axe body spray. I hear the shouts of voices - mostly boys' voices because nice girls don't shout - and catch words like March Madness and dumb bitch and she's so hot. ~ Jennifer Mathieu

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution. ~ David Cronenberg

The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done. ~ Emma Goldman

Building a neighbourhood takes a very long time. It takes at least twenty years and then some. Like a garden, a neighbourhood must be tended regularly and by many people. There are seeds to be sown, little plants to water. And yes, every day there are weeds to be pulled, small problems to be solved before they overwhelm what is good. It is a humble task, and it is never over. There are days when you think the slightest storm could blow all this loveliness away. ~ Mary Jo Leddy

Secrets are like plants. They can stay buried deep in the earth for a long time, but eventually they'll send up shoots and give themselves away. They have to. It's their nature. Just a tiny green stem at first. Which slowly, insidiously grows taller, stronger, unfolding itself, until there it is. A big fat secret, right in front of your face; a fully bloomed flower perfumed with the scent of deception. ~ Judy Reene Singer

It gets lighter." I awnsered with the truth and regretted the glib taste on my tounge. "I mean, it never goes away. The feelings. They never stop, but it gets...I don't know...livable, I guess. Like when you break your leg, at first it's excruciating and you think your going to die. But eventually after you've had time to heal, it kind of fades into this constant, dull ache." A faint breeze whistled through the leaves of the trees and plants surrounding us and tickled the back of my neck like cold fingers. "You never walk the same again, but eventually you do walk. ~ Lisa Roecker

Detroit is beautiful - though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; - such is our personality. ~ Cyril Connolly

Reading books about gardens is a potent pastime; books nourish a gardener's mind in the same way as manure nourishes plants. ~ Mirabel Osler

Let me be the type man who plants a field of flowers so you can be the type of woman who picks them. ~ A.J. Compton

He avoided stepping on the plants - though he wasn't sure why he bothered. The crops hardly seemed worth the effort. Wan, with wilted brown leaves, the plants seemed as depressed as the people who tended them. ~ Brandon Sanderson

The idea that human beings have changed and are changing the basic climate system of the Earth through their industrial activities and burning of fossil fuels - the essence of the Greens' theory of global warming - has about as much basis in science as Marxism and Freudianism. ~ Paul Johnson

Power plants are an infrastructure backbone that I want to be seriously involved in; this is because the country is rapidly developing and has high demand for electricity. ~ Edwin Soeryadjaya

When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction. ~ Richard Heinberg

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend - but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks. ~ Mao Zedong

In recent years, as personal memories have faded, another perspective is beginning to make a tentative appearance in China. This view acknowledges the colossal wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, but it begins to inquire whether perhaps Mao raised an important question, even if his answer to it proved disastrous. The problem Mao is said to have identified is the relationship of the modern state - especially the Communist state - to the people it governs. In largely agricultural - and even incipient industrial - societies, governance concerns issues within the capacity of the general public to understand. Of course, in aristocratic societies, the relevant public is limited. But whatever the formal legitimacy, some tacit consensus by those who are to carry out directives is needed - unless governance is to be entirely by imposition, which is usually unsustainable over a historic period. ~ Henry Kissinger

God plants no yearning in the human soul that he does not intend to satisfy. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

As we walk, he begins telling me all the names of the plants we pass. I already know their names, but I don't tell him that. He seems to think that scientists always want to know the names of things, and so I guess he thinks he's being helpful.Anyway, I like listening to his voice. It's deep and a little hoarse, as if he's been yelling all day, and his accent makes every word sound new and exciting, as if he's speaking another language I don't have to strain to understand.
Here is annatto,for repelling insects and curing snakebites. The girls say it makes a love potion, but I don't believe them. They have all tried it on me, and I don't love any of them. ~ Jessica Khoury

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse. ~ Edward Abbey

Why is the world full of color anyway? Sunlight is white, and when it is reflected, it is still white. And so we should be surrounded by a clinical looking, optically pure landscape. That this is not what we see is because every material absorbs light differently or converts it into other kinds of radiation. Only the wavelengths that remain are refracted and reach our eyes. Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light. And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green.

But why don't we see leaves as black? Why don't they absorb all light? Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super-efficiently, there would be hardly any left over-and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that's why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don't know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am. ~ Peter Wohlleben

Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. ~ Thomas Merton

For many Westerners, "it's natural" seems to mean "it's good." This view is wrong and comes from shopping in supermarkets and living in landscaped environments. Plants evolved toxins to deter animals, fungi, and bacteria from eating them. The list of "natural" foods that need processing to detoxify them goes on and on. Early potatoes were toxic, and the Andean peoples ate clay to neutralize the toxin. Even beans can be toxic without processing. In California, many hunter-gatherer populations relied on acorns, which, similar to manioc, require a labor intensive, multiday leaching process. Many small-scale societies have similarly exploited hardy, tropical plants called cycads for food. But cycads contain a nerve toxin. If not properly processed, they can cause neurological symptoms, paralysis, and death. Numerous societies, including hunter-gatherers, have culturally evolved an immense range of detoxification techniques for cycads. By contrast with our species, other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat. ~ Joseph Henrich

At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder. ~ William Boyd

You begin paying more attention to what you're seeing when you know the names ... If you don't know the names of plant and animal species that share your neighbourhood, you don't care about them and can't protect biodiversity. ~ Robert Bateman

Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing. ~ Guy Debord

There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson, but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government. ~ George F. Will

I do very little industrial design. I'm asked a lot, but I certainly don't see myself as an industrial designer. ~ David Chipperfield

Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education. ~ Aldo Leopold

I have no plants in my house. They won't live for me. Some of them don't even wait to die, they commit suicide. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education.. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Scientists have been saying, for an awfully long time, that we're all interconnected. Scientists would use the word 'ecosystem' to express that idea. Obviously, people can't survive without air and water, and we rely on plants and animals for food, and plants and animals rely on us to preserve their habitats. ~ Naomi Oreskes

We may acknowledge, intellectually, our body's reliance upon those plants and animals that we consume as nourishment, yet the civilized mind still feels itself somehow separate, autonomous, independent of the body and of bodily nature in general. Only as we begin to notice and to experience, once again, our immersion in the invisible air do we start to recall what it is to be fully a part of this world… This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate. ~ David Abram

It was so quiet in that room I could practically hear the plants growing. ~ Suzanne Kelman