Website contents © by Ray Sherman
There is one outstanding important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
—Buckminster Fuller
"We're making a social contribution," said [Ikuo] Onaka, whose business is one of nine firms operating on Tokyo's waterfront to reuse the city's garbage instead of burying it.
—Marla Dickerson (Los Angeles Times)
[Scott] Ochoa said many companies are looking to recycling and the reuse of materials as a way of cutting production costs, while others simply want to do the right thing.
—Kevin Smith (Pasadena [CA] Star News)
Doing the right thing always best.
—Steve Lambert (Pasadena [CA] Star News)
One of the valuable things that religious communities provide is a way of organizing people to do good in the world.... Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good.
—Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
In practical life we have to do with individuals; in science, with species.
—Ludwig Feuerbach
The voice of conscience is the voice of our Father Man who is within us; the accumulated instinct of the race is poured into each one of us, and overflows us, as if the ocean were poured into a cup.
—W.K. Clifford
It is in the vast man that you are vast.
—Kahlil Gibran
In January [2009] more than 150 leading scientists from 26 countries signed a declaration warning that the increasing acidity of the oceans could devastate marine life. Ocean acidification is caused by the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which results from people burning such fossil fuels as coal....
—The World Book
...oil and...other dirty fuels...are fouling our planet in a slow-motion environmental disaster every day.
—Michael Brune (The Sierra Club)
The effort to suspend AB32 is the work of greedy oil companies who want to keep polluting in our state and making profits.
—Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
The population of the world was expected to reach 6.8 billion in July 2009, according to an annual revised projection issued by the United Nations Population Division in March.... The division projected that the world population would reach 7 billion by 2012 and 9 billion by 2050.
—The World Book
...in 2002, humanity’s Ecological Footprint exceeded global biocapacity by 0.4 global hectares per person, or 23 percent. This finding implies that the human economy is in ecological overshoot....
—The Encyclopedia of Earth
Neytiri: Our great mother Eywa does not take sides...; only protects the balance of life.
—James Cameron
Let us imagine that an absolutely unbiased observer on another planet...is examining human behavior on earth If our extramundane observer were a knowledgeable ethologist, he would unavoidably draw the conclusion that man's social organization is very similar to that of rats which, like humans, are social and peaceful beings within their clans, but veritable devils towards all fellow-members of their species not belonging to their own community. If, furthermore, our...naturalist knew of the explosive rise of human populations, the ever-increasing destructiveness of weapons, and the division of mankind into a few political camps, he would not expect the future of humanity to be any rosier than that of several hostile clans of rats on a ship almost devoid of food.
—Konrad Lorenz
...in the case of rats, reproduction stops automatically when a certain state of over-crowding is reached while man as yet has no workable system for preventing the so called population explosion. Furthermore, in the case of rats it is likely that after the wholesale slaughter enough individuals would be left over to propagate the species. In the case of man, this would not be so certain after the use of the hydrogen bomb.
—Konrad Lorenz
In a very real way, the pill [for birth control] is less unnatural in the modern world than doing nothing.
—Malcolm Potts
The increase in number of individuals belonging to the same community is in itself sufficient to upset the balance between the personal bonds and the aggressive drive....That crowding increases the propensity to aggressive behavior has been known and demonstrated experimentally by sociological research.
—Konrad Lorenz
When humanity...reached the level of self-destruction, a question of morality and survival became urgent.
—Kirill I, Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia
[W]e shall emancipate ourselves from the lower ideals dominant in the world and come under the sway of the higher ones. From the power of the emotion of the ideal of self-efficiency—causing us to live and kill and die for self; from the power of the emotion of the tribal ideal—causing us to live and kill and die for tribe; from the power of the emotion of the state ideal—causing us to live and kill and die for state: from the domination of these we shall emancipate ourselves and more and more come under the sway of the highest of all possible ideals, the ideal of Man—causing us to live and, without killing, to die for Humanity.
—Cassius J. Keyser
By Humanity I mean all mankind—not merely the living—but the living, the dead, and the unborn.
—Cassius J. Keyser
...any sphere of human activity is an example of combination of morality and survival of humanity.
—Kirill I, Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia
Corporations can get away with murder and environmental devastation, and make billions doing it.
—Daphne Wysham
...the most immediate reason for ‘our’ failure to act on global warming has been the sustained and often ruthless exercise of political power by the corporations that stand to lose from a shift to low-carbon energy systems.
—Clive Hamilton
...the heart surgery industry is perpetuated by a bunch of charlatan physicians whose egregious activities can only be explained by simple lust for ill-gotten gain.
—Julian Whitaker, MD
[Frank] Buchman believed that both fascism and communism had their roots in materialism, which he called the mother of all "isms" and, as such, materialism was democracy's greatest enemy.
—wikipedia
If Britain and America were to defeat Communism today, the world would be in a worse state than it is. Because the other man is wrong doesn't make me right.
—Frank Buchman
Everybody wants to see the other fellow changed....if you want an answer for the world today, the best place to start with is with yourself.
—Frank Buchman
Human problems aren't economic. They're moral....
—Frank Buchman
Among the many phylogenically adapted norms of human behavior, there is hardly one that does not need to be controlled and kept on a leash by responsible morality....Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man....The fate of humanity hangs on the question whether or not responsible morality will be able to cope with its rapidly growing burden.
—Konrad Lorenz
We all suffer to some extent from the necessity to control our natural inclinations by exercise of moral responsibility. Some of us, lavishly endowed with social inclinations, suffer hardly at all....
—Konrad Lorenz
...insight into the nature of values offers the only hope for our ever creating the new values and ideals which our present situation needs so badly.
—Konrad Lorenz
The State...protects its own citizens only; it recognizes human rights, humanity, civilization within its own confines alone. Since it recognizes no rights outside itself, it logically arrogates to itself the right to exercise the most ferocious inhumanity toward all foreign populations, which it can plunder, exterminate, or enslave at will.
—Mikhail Bakunin
...an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood, it is necessary for survival....
—Albert Einstein
...humanity needs to move beyond egocentric individualism or the perspective of chauvinistic nationalism. The planetary community needs to develop new transnational institutions. The new reality of the twenty-first century is the fact that no one on the planet can live in isolation, and every part of the world community is interdependent.—Paul Kurtz
We have an obligation to future generations yet unborn....
—Paul Kurtz