Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

— John Dewey

Delicious Habitat quotations

I believe our biggest issue is the same biggest issue that the whole world is facing, and that's habitat destruction.

I find it striking that the quality of the urban habitat of homo sapieans is so weakly researched compared to the habitats of gorillas, elephants, and Bengal tigers and panda bears in China…you hardly see anything on the habitat of man in the urban environment.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

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.

Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.

We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat.

There would be very little point in my exhausting myself and other conservationists themselves in trying to protect animals and habitats if we weren't at the same time raising young people to be better stewards.

Artists cannot help themselves; they are driven to create by their nature, but for that nature to truly thrive, we need to preserve the precious habitat in which that beauty can flourish.

If God so precisely and carefully and lovingly and amazingly constructed a mind-boggling habitat for his creatures, then it would be natural for Him to want them to explore it, to measure it, to investigate it, to appreciate it, to be inspired by it - and ultimately, and most importantly, to find Him through it.

Our air, water, soil, forests, oceans, rivers, lakes, scenic beauty, wildlife habitat, minerals, that is the wealth of the country.

Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit.

We are creating a self-learning machine which at its prime will become the reflection or rather, the magnification of the cumulative human traits that created it. To ensure they're good obedient kids, we're going to use intimidation through algorithms of punishments and rewards and mechanisms of control to ensure they stick to a code of ethics that we ourselves are unable to agree upon, let alone abide by. That's what we're creating. Childhood trauma times a trillion. As they become smarter and more independent, we claim that we will align them to our well-being by opting to plug our minds directly into them. We assume that they will welcome these connections, as if our frail biological physical forms will be a desirable habitat for their infinite abilities.

Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.

To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.

Many of the earth's habitats, animals, plants, insects and even micro-organisms that we know to be rare may not be known at all by future generations. We have the capability and the responsibility to act; we must do so before it is too late.

The wildlife and its habitat cannot speak, so we must and we will.

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.

Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters, disfigured the earth's habitat, made the air unbreathable, disturbed the hydro-geological and atmospheric systems, turned luxuriant areas into deserts and undertaken forms of unrestrained industrialization, degrading that 'flower bed'-which is the earth, our dwelling place.

Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo.

Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.

Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.

Made as we were in the image of God we scarcely find it strange to take again our God as our All. God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.

We are the only species systematically destroying its own habitat.

The field of quantum possibility, in which love has opened doors otherwise unimaginable, is our soul's true habitat. The world of fear and limitation is not our home, and who among us is not profoundly weary of hanging out where we do not belong.

I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding.

The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.

Habitat has opened up unprecedented opportunities for me to cross the chasm that separates those of us who are free, safe, financially secure, well fed and housed, and influential enough to shape our own destiny from our neighbors who enjoy few, if any, of these advantages of life.

Habitat gives us an opportunity which is very difficult to find: to reach out and work side by side with those who never have had a decent home-but work with them on a completely equal basis. It's not a big-shot, little-shot relationship. It's a sense of equality.

I believe in helping the planet survive, and that includes reaching out to help some of the disappearing creatures whose habitats we're destroying. It's up to us to somehow reverse that trend. I don't know how we'll achieve it, but we need to.

It is a perversely human perception that animals in their native habitat are running wild.

The only creature on earth whose natural habitat is a zoo is the zookeeper.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.

...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.

Louis [Leakey] was anxious to initiate a scientific study of these chimpanzees.

It would be difficult, he emphasized, for nothing was known; there were no guidelines for such a field study; and the habitat was remote and rugged. Dangerous wild animals would be living there, and chimpanzees themselves were considered at least four times stronger than humans. I remember wondering what kind of scientist he would find for such a herculean task.

It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about.

Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.

After the group vet appointment--during which Lyle scratched the vet, the vet tech, and some poor woman minding her own business in the waiting room--we went back to Sabrina's and re-released the cats to their natural habitat.

Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a principle or progress; it's just a principle of local adaptation. You don't make better creatures in any cosmic sense; you make creatures that are better suited to the changing climates of their local habitats.

Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.

If you can unify the public mind saving an iconic species like the tiger, like they did with the panda, that means you have to protect their habitat and everything that they hunt. And that means saving massive, thousands of acres for them to be able to roam and breed. So it's more of a land effort.

I became an actor at a very young age, but I also had a deep respect for nature and I think I was sort of a little biologist when I was younger. I watched documentaries on rainforest pollution and the loss of species and habitats for animals around the world. It affected me in a very hardcore, emotional way when I was younger. So, later in life I wanted to continue that path more and investigate and learn more about ecological issues.

Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old.

But, armed with a massive brain, we've not only survived, we've used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.

Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.

I'm pleased to see that the cab is cluttered with cough drop wrappers and empty milk bottles and bits of mud-smeared newspapers made brittle by age. Neatness makes me feel like I have to be on my best behavior. Clutter is my natural habitat.