Rachel Carson

1907–1964 · American marine biologist and conservationist

Topics: learning, creativity, software engineering, engineering leadership

• If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

  — Rachel Carson

• This is an age that has produced floods of how-to-do-it books, and it is also an age of how-to-do-it science. It is, in other words, the age of technology, in which if we know how to do something, we do it without pausing to inquire whether we should.

  — Rachel Carson

• What we are today represents an adjustment achieved over the millions and hundreds of millions of years.

  — Rachel Carson

• 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.

  — Rachel Carson

• Fishes and plankton, whales and squids, birds and sea turtles, all are linked by unbreakable ties to certain kinds of water—to warm water or cold water, to clear or turbid water, to water rich in phosphates or in silicates.

  — Rachel Carson

• Writing is a lonely occupation at best.

  — Rachel Carson

• We have acquired technical skills on a scale undreamed of even a generation ago. We can do dramatic things and we can do them quickly; by the time damaging side effects are apparent it is often too late, or impossible, to reverse our actions.

  — Rachel Carson

• This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.

  — Rachel Carson

• Day by day and season by season, the ocean dominates the world's climate.

  — Rachel Carson

• 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.

  — Rachel Carson

• I believe that only in that atmosphere of intellectual freedom can we solve the problems before us now.

  — Rachel Carson

• The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.

  — Rachel Carson

• Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science. So the English poet Francis Thompson said nearly a century ago, ‘Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.’ But the poet's insight has not become part of general knowledge.

  — Rachel Carson

• There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life-we are never bored. We can't be. There is always something new to be investigated. Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one...

  — Rachel Carson

• I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future.

  — Rachel Carson