Happy Earth Day everyone

Earth Day falls on April 22, 2014 and events are held worldwide by the nonprofit Earth Day Network. The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 by Denis Hayes and it is now considered to be the largest secular holiday in the world. Fun fact: Earth Day even has an official (yet kind of official) anthem.

"Joyful joyful we adore our Earth in all its wonderment, Simple gifts of nature that all join into a paradise, Now we must resolve to protect her, Show her our love throughout all time, With our gentle hand and touch, We make our home a newborn world, Now we must resolve to protect her, Show her our love throughout all time, With our gentle hand and touch, We make our home a newborn world."

Here are 40 quotes to celebrate our planet: 

1. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtfully committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead

2. "You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet." -- Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

3. "For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death." -- Tom McMillan

4. "There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew." -- Marshall McLuhan

5. "Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?" -- Groucho Marx

6. "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." -- Native American Proverb

7. "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" -- Henry David Thoreau

8. "Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth." -- Henry David Thoreau

9. "Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them." -- Bill Vaughan

10. "There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all." -- Robert Orben

11. "The wealth of the nation is its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats and biodiversity … that’s all there is. That’s the whole economy. That’s where all the economic activity and jobs come from. These biological systems are the sustaining wealth of the world." -- Gaylord Nelson

12. "I'm not an environmentalist. I'm an Earth warrior." -- Darryl Cherney, quoted in Smithsonian, April 1990

13. "Until a man duplicates a blade of grass, Nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge. Remedies from chemicals will never stand in favorable comparison with the products of Nature, the living cell of a plant, the final result of the rays of the sun, the mother of all life." -- Thomas Alva Edison

14. "A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist. If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it's taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power. His fairness. His very existence. But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says -- go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job. Or, better yet, lend me a hand. I have no time for idle whining." -- David Brin

15. "The earth is what we all have in common." -- Wendell Berry

16. "For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death." -- Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990

17. "To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour." -- William Blake

18. "I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn." -- A Chieftan from Nigeria

19. "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more." -- George Gordon, Lord Byron

20. "And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." -- William Shakespeare

21. "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." -- John Muir

22. "Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money." -- Cree Indian Proverb

23. "Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet, and the winds long to play with your hair." -- Kahlil Gibran

24. "Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea." -- George Carlin

25. "Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees." -- David Letterman

26. "He that plants trees loves others beside himself." -- Thomas Fuller

27. "The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun." -- Ralph Nader

28. "There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet." -- Brooke Medicine Eagle

29. "There is a great need for the introduction of new values in our society, where bigger is not necessarily better, where slower can be faster, and where less can be more." -- Gaylord Nelson

30. "We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Walt Kelly

31. "I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority." -- Elwyn Brooks White, Essays of E.B. White, 1977

32. "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." -- Frank Lloyd Wright

33. "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." -- John Muir

34. "The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it." -- Barry Commoner

35. "Every day is Earth Day." -- Author Unknown

36. "Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature." -- Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1963

37. "Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away." --Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990

38. "Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind." -- David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978

39. "It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times ... What the Dickens is going on here." -- Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989

40. "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more."
-- George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Source:  www.latintime.com       author:  Susmita Baral

Enjoy Earth Day everyone!