Quotes About Impact

Because no matter what anyone tells you, words and ideas have the power to change the world.

savor language and words because no matter what anyone tells you, words and ideas have the power to change the world.

The worst blows, even when they're not intended to harm, are the ones we don't expect.

His voice wasn't loud, but there was a quality to it that made Matt shiver even though he—for once—wasn't the one in trouble.

But you know, I get tired of these overwhelming physical presences like your Mr. Hawke. All charisma and outsized ego, using the intensity of their beliefs to hit you like a fist. It's wearing.

A great man has said that racism is the biggest cancer of his lifetime. But just because he can't cure that cancer didn't mean he shouldn't attack it in small ways." "Martin Luther King?" I asked. Judge Potter shook his head. "Charles Barkley.

No matter how good the message may be, it will be useless unless it is done well (Interview in A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 2000)

Anyone in this world can have the power of life and death over someone else. It's horrible, but true. All you need to do is take it. And once you have -- there is no going back. (The Killer's Cousin)

What if it's all a hoax and we've created a better world for nothing?

According to Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute and codirector of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, the roughly 500 million richest of us on the planet are responsible for about half of all global emissions. That would include the rich in every country in the world, notably in countries like China and India, as well significant parts of the middle classes in North America and Europe.

Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive at this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face– and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.

The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies remain some of the most profitable corporations in history...These companies are rich, quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto regular people around the world.

global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization."21

cambiar de rumbo puede salvar vidas a una escala

And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it's that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.

Most of these scientists were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover that they were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.

the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48

I email a friend in Seattle, a prominent environmentalist, to ask him how he is faring in the smoke. He reports that the birds have stopped singing, and he is mad all the time. At least I'm not the only one.

significant cause of rising emissions is not the reproductive behavior of the poor but the consumer behaviors of the rich.

But all the facts were not yet in when Watt was being memorialized in marble in 1825. Because it is the cumulative impact of the carbon emissions that began in those early mills and mines that has already engraved itself in the geologic record—in the levels of the oceans, in their chemical composition, in the slow erasure of islands like Nauru; in the retreat of glaciers, the collapse of ice shelves, the thawing of permafrost; in the disturbed soil cycles and in the charred forests.

Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it in your head for very long.

You cannot advocate massive economic change in a country without that change having big political consequences.

The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas comes out." —Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 20131

The World Bank also warned when it released its report that "we're on track for a 4°C warmer world [by century's end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.