[sustran] Food for thought for Car Free Days

[ecoplan.adsl at wanadoo.fr]

This fine collection appears in an unexpected corner of the Quote
Garden, at http://www.quotegarden.com/car-free-day.html. I am sure that
a number of you here will read and appreciate.  ;-)

 

 

Quotations for World Car-Free Day

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the
future of the human race.  ~H.G. Wells

The car has become... an article of dress without which we feel
uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.  ~Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media, 1964 


The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved
the living tissue of the city.  Its appetite for space is absolutely
insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the
buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and
ugly traffic.  ~James Marston Fitch, New York Times, 1 May 1960 


The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty.  The activist
is the man who cleans up the river.  ~Ross Perot


Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.  ~Lewis Mumford



Modern technology
Owes ecology
An apology.
~Alan M. Eddison

Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful -
that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!
~Dr. Paul MacCready, Jr.

 You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in
favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20
minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote
80 to 20 against it.  We are a long way in this country from taking
individual responsibility for the environmental problem.  ~William D.
Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times, 30 November 1988

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise
healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.  ~Paul
Dudley White


Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.  ~Steven Wright


I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.  ~G.M. Trevelyan


Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to
smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.  ~Mary Ellen
Kelly


The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," 1841


It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil
spill.  It was yours.  ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25
February 1990


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


Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find.  ~Quoted in Time


 
Remember the street car cannot turn out.  ~Charles M. Hayes


 
Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary
space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get
himself five miles to work and back each day.  ~Bill Vaughan


When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.
Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man.
And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he
used it, the fitter his body became.  Here, for once, was a product of
man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no
harm or irritation to others.  Progress should have stopped when man
invented the bicycle.  ~Elizabeth West, Hovel in the Hills


Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world.
~Grant Peterson


A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.
~Arnold Toynbee


Americans are broad-minded people.  They'll accept the fact that a
person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a
newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with
him.  ~Art Buchwald, "How Un-American Can You Get?," Have I Ever Lied to
You?, 1966


Automobiles are not ferocious.... it is man who is to be feared.
~Robbins B. Stoeckel


In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed
country, don't breathe the air.  ~Changing Times magazine


Every day is Earth Day.  ~Author Unknown


Restore human legs as a means of travel.  Pedestrians rely on food for
fuel and need no special parking facilities.  ~Lewis Mumford


Consider the man on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for
most of my life.  Well, mostly he is a good man, but there is a change
in him as soon as he mounts.  Every man on horseback is an arrogant man,
however gentle he may be on foot.  The man in the automobile is one
thousand times as dangerous.  I tell you, it will engender absolute
selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles becomes common.  It
will breed violence on a scale never seen before.  It will mark the end
of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living
happily in one home.  It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the
true sense of Nation.  It will create giantized cankers of cities, false
opulence of suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerations
of specialized farming and manufacturing.  It will make every man a
tyrant.  ~R.A. Lafferty, written in the late 1800s, as quoted in
Adbusters, Spring 1996


One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King
Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal.  At least one
execution for that offense is recorded.  But economics triumphed over
health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in
England.  ~Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech,
Argonne National Laboratory, 1969


 No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.
~Garrett Hardin, The Ecologist, February 1974


 Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
~E.B. White, One Man's Meat, 1943 


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


As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog
across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves
seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on
another planet to say about us:  "With all their genius and with all
their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and
ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed
around them."  ~U Thant, speech, 1970


What fools indeed we morals are
To lavish care upon a Car,
With ne'er a bit of time to see
About our own machinery!
~John Kendrick Bangs


 Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called
stardust?  ~Lane Olinghouse


I'm not sure... about automobiles.... With all their speed forward they
may be a step backward in civilization - that is, in spiritual
civilization.  It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the
world, nor to the life of men's souls.  I am not sure.  But automobiles
have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us
suspect.  They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be
different because of what they bring.  They are going to alter war, and
they are going to alter peace.  I think men's minds are going to be
changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could
hardly guess.  But you can't have the immense outward changes that they
will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that... the spiritual
alteration will be bad for us.  Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now,
if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able
to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree... that
automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'  ~Eugene, from Booth
Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, 1918


You can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamn
contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the
sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus.  When traces of blood
begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe.  ~Edward Abbey


Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget
us.  ~Henrik Tikkanen


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 

 

 

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