Here is a collection of our favourite quotes. If you have any great quotes to add to our page please let us know.
Quotes which cover soils are orange, quotes which cover knowledge and science are green and earth and nature are brown.
“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”— Henry David Thoreau
“What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” — Henry David Thoreau
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” — Nelson Mandela
“Upon this handful of soil our survival depends”-– Sanskrit text,1500 BC
“Land really is the best art.”— Andy Warhol
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” — Niels Bohr
“While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil.”— Thomas Jefferson
“We are part of the earth and it is part of us … What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.”— Chief Seattle
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
“To be a successful farmer one must first know the nature of the soil.”— Xenophon
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”— Mahatma Gandhi
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”— Mahatma Gandhi
“Standing on soil feels so much different than standing on city pavement; it lets you look inward and reflect and see who you really are, while you see a beautiful, unspoiled land as far as the eye can see. It allows your inner life to grow”–Ricardo Montalban
“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.” — Albert Einstein
“Despite all our achievements we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains” — Farm equipment association of Minnesota and South Dakota
“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”-– Albert Einstein
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”— Albert Einstein
“I can’t imagine anything more important than air, water, soil, energy and biodiversity. These are the things that keep us alive.”— David Suzuki
“If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.”— David Suzuki
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” — Douglas Adams
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Daniel J. Boorstin
“If the soil is destroyed, then our liberty of action and choice are gone …”— W.C. Lowdermilk
“Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.” –Gary Snyder
“All knowledge hurts.”—Cassandra Clare
“We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.”— Freeman Dyson
“…we are one people, one community, sharing common resources and living in a shared landscape.”— Rob Stokes
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” —Mark Twain
“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.”— Mark Twain
“We might say that the earth has the spirit of growth; that its flesh is the soil.”— Leonardo da Vinci
“We know more about the movement of celestial bodies that about the soil underfoot.”— Leonardo da Vinci
“I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.” — Chief from Nigeria
“Doctor Who: You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!”— Russell T. Davies
“We are losing 30 soccer fields of soil every minute, mostly due to intensive farming”— Volkert Engelsman
“I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?”— Robert Redford
“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“Soils are the basis of life, ninety five percent of our food comes from the soil.” –Maria-Helena Semedo
“About a third of the world’s soil has already been degraded”–Maria-Helena Semedo
“Finding mechanisms for putting carbon back into landscapes enhances biodiversity. More biodiverse ecosystems store more carbon, more securely and are more resilient to the impacts of climate change.“–Will Steffen
“Confidence is ignorance. If you’re feeling cocky, it’s because there’s something you don’t know.” — Eoin Colfer
“When you throw dirt, you lose ground.” –Texan proverb
“This is the rollcall of evolution happening in the space of a few generations, the greatest loss of living things that make up our biodiversity since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.”–Peter Garrett
“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.” — Hilary Mantel
“Almost all other issues are superficial by comparison to soil loss. So why don’t we talk about it?”–George Monbiot
“War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything else goes with it.”–George Monbiot
“Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters”–George Monbiot
“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for it’s the only thing in this world that lasts. It’s the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for…”– Margaret Mitchell
“[Question: What do you think was the most important physics idea to emerge this year?]
We won’t know for a few years”— Stephen Hawkings
“Soil destruction creates a vicious cycle, in which less carbon is stored, the world gets hotter, and the land is further degraded.”– FAO 2015
“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.”–Native American Proverb
Every time we get slapped down, we can say, “Thank you Mother Nature,” because it means we’re about to learn something important.”— John N. Bahcall
“Whatever is affixed to the soil belongs to the soil”— Anglo-Saxon Law
“The land is a mother that never dies.”–Maori Proverb
“Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.”–Henri Poincare
“Essentially, all life depends upon the soil”— Charles E. Kellogg
“There can be no life without soil and no soil without life; they have evolved together.”— Charles E. Kellogg
“Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.”— Charles E. Kellogg
“Civilization has its roots in the soil.”— Charles E. Kellogg
“For all things come from earth, and all things end by becoming earth.”–Xenophanes
“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”–George Bernard Shaw
“It is apparent that no lifetime is long enough in which to explore the resources of a few square yards of ground.”–Alice M. Coats
“We’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds. We’re protecting it for our own sake…”–Robert F. Kennedy Jr
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”–Isaac Asimov
“The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest.”— Charles Dudley Warner
“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.”— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”–Howard Nemerov
“Agriculturalists have long realized that many important properties of soils are inherited from the rocks. Technical expressions like limestone soils or granite soils are encountered in the oldest text books on agricultural subjects. They clearly convey the importance of parent material on soil formation”–Hans Jenny
“If we do not permit the Earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either.”–Joseph Wood Krutch
“Good decisions can’t be made in the absence of good information…”— Anon
“Science is to politics as a lamp post is to a drunk; it is for leaning on, not illumination.”-– Anon
“Insecurity exists in the absence of knowledge.”— Anon
“Knowledge become power only when we put it into use.”— Anon
“We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it is.”— William Vogt
“Environmental sustainability is not an option – it is a necessity. For economies to flourish, for global poverty to be banished, for the well-being of the world’s people to be enhanced – not just in this generation but in succeeding generations – we have a compelling and ever more urgent duty of stewardship to take care of the natural environment and resources on which our economic activity and social fabric depends. … A new paradigm that sees economic growth, social justice and environmental care advancing together can become the common sense of our age.”— Gordon Brown
“Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.”-– Dalai Lama
“I saw all the people hustling early in the morning to go into the factories and the stores and the office buildings, to do their job, to get their check. But ultimately it’s not office buildings or jobs that give us our checks. It’s the soil. The soil is what gives us the real income that supports us all.”-– Ed Begley, Jr.
“A solution will need to be found to the ‘two cultures’ approach that separates scientists and economists: the environment and the economy are interdependent. Ultimately, Australia can and should choose to set a moral example and work towards a new economic base.”–Barry Jones
“Some of our dirt is stardust, the remains of stars that fall to Earth after they’re caught by gravity”--Lynn B. Coulter
“It’s our landscape which defines our identity and it’s what I’m most grateful for.”–Michael Dodson
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”–Confucius
“Soil organic matter sustains agriculture, which sustains civilization”— Rattan Lal
Soil organic matter generates and regulates every ecosystem service that sustains life on earth”— Rattan Lal
“Topsoil loss in excess of topsoil formation has been the defining characteristic of agriculture”— Rattan Lal
“Carbon is the currency of life. The rapid formation of carbon-rich topsoil is the greatest priority and opportunity of our time”— Rattan Lal
“If you harvest a crop you are removing nutrients from that ecosystem – for sustainable production they need to be replaced”— Rattan Lal
“We can only call ourselves Australian if we have a long-term future in this country and that means to live sustainably.”–Tim Flannery
“Our world is a web of interdependencies woven so tightly it sometimes becomes love.”–Tim Flannery
“Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.”— Plato
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.”-– Plato
“Nowhere in nature are species so densely packed as in soil communities.”–FAO
“In most countries there is little opportunity for expansion of arable land”–FAO
“Healthy soils are the basis to healthy food production”–FAO
“Soil is a non-renewable resource, its preservation is essential for food security and our sustainable future”–FAO
“Soils store and filter water improving our resilience to floods and droughts”–FAO
“Nature favours those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive”.— James Lovelock
“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”–William Shakespeare
“… the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil.”— Daniel Hillel
“so commonplace and seemingly abundant are soils that we tend to treat them contemptuously”— Daniel Hillel
“Global Catch 22: Mankind seems hell bent on being the only species left on earth; the problem is that our survival and continued existence relies on the very biodiversity we destroy.”— Jim Frazier
“There is no wealth like knowledge, and no poverty like ignorance.”–Buddha
“There is nothing in the whole nature which is more important or deserves as much attention as the soil. Truly it is the soil which nourishes and provides for the whole nature, the whole of creation depends on the soil, which is the ultimate foundation of our existence”.–Friedrich Albert Fallon – German scientist, 1862
“ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT isn’t rocket science, it’s a lot more complex.” — Nick Dexter
“There are in fact two things, science and opinion. The former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.”–Hippocrates
“When scientists discuss methods of analysing a solution for traces of phosphate, they are practical, reasonable, and unemotional. When the same men discuss the classification of soils, these virtues are liable to evaporate.”— G. W. Leeper
“Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.”–Theodore Roosevelt
“For knowledge, too, is itself power.”— Francis Bacon
“Soils are developed; they are not merely an accumulation of debris resulting from decay of rock and organic materials … In other words, a soil is an entity — an object in nature which has characteristics that distinguish it from all other objects in nature.”–C.E.Millar & L.M.Turk
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.–Carl Sagan
“I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.”–Carl Sagan
“A cloak of loose, soft material, held to the earth’s hard surface by gravity, is all that lies between life and lifelessness.”–Wallace H. Fuller
“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.”–Aristotle
“Many can argue – not many converse.”--Amos Bronson Alcott
“Our industrial systems are taking carbon from the soil instead of building carbon in the soil.”-– Woody Tasch
“We are strong in terms of tillage, but weak in terms of fertility.”— Woody Tasch
“We have less and less organic matter, and fewer and fewer people who know what it feels, smells or tastes like.”— Woody Tasch
“… if we don’t get agriculture right, then we can’t ever really get at the great systemic crisis of climate change and the increasing dysfunction of our institutions.”— Woody Tasch
“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”–Benjamin Franklin
“We are overlooking soil as the foundation of all life on earth”— Andres Arnalds
“I would rather be tied to the soil as a serf … than be king of all these dead and destroyed.”— Homer
“Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.”–Aldo Leopold
“Soil is the last necessary thing. With air and water, a person can live 30 days; add but a comely pile of dirt and life expectancy expands a thousand times.”— Justin Isherwood
“To understand the birds, you must first understand the plants. To understand the plants, you must first understand the soil“–William H. Drury