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"We have two paths. Either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!" Evo Morales   "The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline (taken in relation to the history of 'being') and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with Kulturpessimismus, and of course it has nothing to do with any sort of optimism either; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative, have assumed such proportions throughout the earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long since become absurd." Martin Heidegger   "Until the nineteenth century, it was generally believed that the earth was still found as it had originally been created—an event of only about six thousand years ago. There was no thought that the earth might be four billion years old, or that it had been transformed by vast geological upheavals and the biological evolution of dinosaurs and many thousands of other plant and animal species, most of which had long ago become extinct. A good Christian thus believed that in visiting nature he or she was encountering 'the creation' in its original character. God was not actually in nature—that would be the heresy of pantheism—but God had created the natural world as an expression of his true thinking and essence. God was like the painter of a picture that, amazingly enough, could now still be seen here on earth. One could thus discover in nature literally a product of God's own handiwork in the first six days. For the Christian faithful it would be hard to imagine a more inspirational thought." Robert Nelson   "If you desire to know why some kind of bodies sink naturally downwards toward the earth, and others go naturally from it, the Schools will tell you, out of Aristotle, that the bodies that sink downwards are heavy; and that this heaviness is it that causes them to descend. But if you ask what they mean by heaviness, they will define it to be an endeavour to go to the center of the earth: so that the cause why things sink downward is an endeavour to be below; which is as much as to say that bodies descend, or ascend, because they do. Or they will tell you the centre of the earth is the place of rest and conservation for heavy things, and therefore they endeavour to be there: as if stones and metals had a desire, or could discern the place they would be at, as man does; or loved rest, as man does not; or that a piece of glass were less safe in the window than falling into the street." Thomas Hobbes   "It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. The earth, by these labours of mankind, has been obliged to redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants. It is to no purpose that the proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest that grows upon them. The homely and vulgar proverb, that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with regard to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant." Adam Smith   "England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people's state. And it is not the case that we think England is the richest land on earth. There are lords and City men in England who are in fact the richest men on earth. The broad masses, however, see little of this wealth. We see in England an army of millions of impoverished, socially enslaved, and oppressed people. Child labor is still a matter of course there. They have only heard about social welfare programs. Parliament occasionally discusses social legislation. Nowhere else is there such terrible and horrifying inequality as in the English slums." Joseph Goebbels   "No one in his senses, or imbued with the slightest knowledge of physics will ever think that the earth, heavy and unwieldy from its own weight and mass, staggers up and down around its own centre and that of the sun; for at the slightest jar of the earth, we would see cities and fortresses, towns and mountains thrown down." Jean Bodin   "Unappreciated cranks submitted their programmes for the betterment of humanity, believing that at last their much-scorned ideas would have a chance to turn earth into Paradise. They all had their own infallible and omnipotent cures; and, granted their premises, their logic was unimpeachable. Some believed that the root of all evil was cooked food, others the gold standard, others unhygienic underwear, or machinery, or the lack of a compulsory universal language, or multiple stores, or birth control. They reminded me of the Swabian shoemaker who wrote a voluminous pamphlet to prove that man owed his moral sickness to the fact that he satisfied his elementary needs in closed rooms and with the aid of artificial paper; whereas if he spent these daily moments out in the woods and availed himself of the natural moss all spiritual poisons would also evaporate into the surrounding air, and he would be at the same time bodily and spiritually purified, returning to his work with a strengthened social conscience and a diminished egoism; true love of humanity would be awakened and the Kingdom of God on Earth would be at hand." Ernst Toller   "From what I have said of the natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans: being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition: the Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life; they covet not magnificent houses, household-stuff etc. They live in a warm and fine climate and enjoy a very wholesome air, so that they have very little need of clothing and this they seem to be fully sensible of, for many to whom we gave cloth etc to, left it carelessly upon the sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. In short they seemed to set no value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this, in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessaries of life and that they have no superfluities." James Cook   "Civilization even in its most servile forms has always offered much that is enormously attractive, convenient, and congenial to mankind; but something restless and untamed in our race has striven continually to convert civilization from its original reliance upon unparticipating obedience into a community of participating wills. And to the lurking nomadism in our blood, and particularly in the blood of monarchs and aristocracies, we must ascribe also that incessant urgency towards a wider range that forces every state to extend its boundaries if it can, and to spread its interests to the ends of the earth. The power of nomadic restlessness that tends to bring all the earth under one rule seems to be identical with the spirit that makes most of us chafe under direction and restraint, and seek to participate in whatever government we tolerate." Herbert George Wells   "The agricultural life, often referred to as 'pastoral' or 'rural,' seems a natural world to modern-day city dwellers and suburbanites. A weekend drive in the country is a time for relaxing and 'going back to nature.' Yet farming is not nature, but rather the largest alteration of Earth's surface from its natural state that humans have yet achieved. Cities and factories and even suburban mega-malls are still trivial dots on maps compared to the extent of farmland devoted to pastures and crops (more than a third of Earth's land surface)." William Ruddiman   "Zarathustra invokes man's happiness, reason, and virtue—and characterizes them as 'poverty, filth, and wretched contentment.' Men have been conditioned by these things for so long that they have mistaken them for the real meaning of living. As a consequence, men have become impoverished and wasted; what is worse is that they are contented with their lot. They have been following a set of moral standards which they mistake for the real meaning of life. They want security, so they succumb to religion which promises them salvation, but only after they have renounced the earth in the hope for a better life after death. The meaning of the earth for them is that it has no meaning at all, not unless a deity rules over it." Paolo Bolaños   "I suppose a greater mistake was never committed in the world than this wretched Lord Canning's maudlin proclamation about mercy. It would have been bad enough if the Hindus lived in the Strand here, and had the ideas of London vagabonds; but, addressed to the Oriental character, it is hideously absurd and dangerous. I wish I were Commander in Chief over there! I would address that Oriental character which must be powerfully spoken to, in something like the following placard, which should be vigorously translated into all native dialects, 'I, The Inimitable, holding this office of mine, and firmly believing that I hold it by the permission of Heaven and not by the appointment of Satan, have the honor to inform you Hindu gentry that it is my intention, with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with the late abominable atrocities.'" Charles Dickens   "Is there anything absolutely useful on this earth and in this life of ours? To begin with, there is mighty little use in our being on this earth and living. I challenge the wisest of the company to tell us what we are good for unless it be not to subscribe to the Constitutionnel or any other paper." Theophile Gautier   "There are poets who have never written a line of poetry; artists who are completely unaware that they have ever in their lives fulfilled more than the daily round, the common task, illuminated by enjoyment of such simple things as days of sun, pints of beer, and being in love. They have put beautiful craftsmanship into the making of a gate, thatching a roof, mending a pair of boots; poured out a wealth of creative love in the making of a garden. They have enjoyed the smell of the earth in the morning, and been aware of the colours and shadows and rhythms of the days. Many a writer of books and painter of pictures is less of an artist than many such simple inarticulate people in whose veins, unknown to them, flows the poetry of earth, the rhythm of life itself." Ethel Mannin   "Almost without exception, any common-sense view of the world is scientifically false. Obvious examples are the movement of the sun with respect to the earth, and the fact that a force on a body does not cause movement, but acceleration. How unnatural it is to believe, rightly, that at a constant 400 miles per hour on a plane, there is no force acting on you to move you ahead. And how well does Darwin's theory of evolution by random variation and natural selection fit with common sense? Even the number of molecules in a glass of water is beyond anyone's natural expectation: there are more than there are glasses of water in the oceans. No matter where one looks in science, its ideas confound common sense. It is not even easy to think of how ice cools one's drink in the correct way: cold does not flow from the ice to the liquid, it is the heat flowing from the liquid that melts the ice." Lewis Wolpert   "Famines and plague, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets afflicted the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods which turned into major disasters because the empire's drainage system, like most of the imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning. It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent. Most others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European harbors until the eighth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries. The serfs' basic agricultural tools were picks, forks, spades, rakes, scythes, and balanced sickles. Because there was very little iron, there were no wheeled plowshares with moldboards. The lack of plows was not a major problem in the south, where farmers could pulverize light Mediterranean soils, but the heavier earth in northern Europe had to be sliced, moved, and turned by hand. Although horses and oxen were available, they were of limited use. The horse collar, harness, and stirrup did not exist until about A.D. 900. Therefore tandem hitching was impossible. Peasants labored harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more often than their animals." William Manchester   "It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Nietzsche lamented what Christians had done to classical civilization. He admired the Greeks not despite but because of their cruelty. Indeed, so scornful was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. 'In the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty,' he wrote, 'before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.'" Tom Holland   "Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I'm not bringing in another person to deal with that." Miley Cyrus   "What is the difference between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's? You cannot treat people like cattle. You must respect the diversity of cultures on earth. Lomborg thinks of people like numbers. He thinks it would be cheaper just to evacuate people from the Maldives, rather than trying to prevent world sea levels from rising so that island groups like the Maldives or Tuvalu just disappear into the sea. But where's the respect for people in that? People have a right to live and die in the place where their forefathers have lived and died. If you were to accept Lomborg's way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing." Raj Pachauri