... men as a rule are more preoccupied with the dangers that threaten their life than interested in the biological forces on which they depend for a constructive existence.

... each type of civilization has had diseases peculiar to it and at each period the various social groups in any community also have differed in this regard.

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.

But solving problems of disease is not the same thing as creating health and happiness. (...) Health and happiness are the expression of the manner in which the individual responds and adapts to the challenges that he meets in everyday life.

The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.

It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.