Pollution encompasses the introduction of harmful substances into the environment, including air, water, soil, and sound. Human activities such as industrial processes, transportation, and improper waste disposal contribute to pollution. Types include air pollution from vehicle emissions, water pollution from industrial discharge, soil pollution from chemicals, noise pollution from urban activities, light pollution from excessive artificial lighting, and thermal pollution from temperature changes in water bodies. Pollution poses significant threats to ecosystems, human health, and biodiversity. Addressing pollution requires regulatory measures, technological advancements, public awareness, and sustainable practices to mitigate its adverse effects and promote environmental well-being.
Pollution Quotes
1. “Sooner or later, we will have to recognise that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.”
— Evo Morales
2. “I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy, without pollution or global warming.”
— Stephen Hawking
3. “Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.”
— Ronald Reagan
4. “Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
5. “If our nation wants to reduce global warming, air pollution and energy instability, we should invest only in the best energy options. Nuclear energy isn’t one of them.”
— Mark Z. Jacobson
6. “The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.”
— Christian de Duve
7. “When I wrote ‘The Giver,’ it contained no so-called ‘bad words.’ It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of ‘The Giver’; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.”
— Lois Lowry
8. “Sustainability is not just about adopting the latest energy-efficient technologies or turning to renewable sources of power. Sustainability is the responsibility of every individual every day. It is about changing our behaviour and mindset to reduce power and water consumption, thereby helping to control emissions and pollution levels.”
— Joe Kaeser
9. “Energy efficiency not only saves businesses and consumers money, but it also reduces pollution by cutting energy use.”
— Jeff Van Drew
10. “I see a future where getting to work or to school or to the store does not have to cause pollution.”
— Bernie Sanders
11. “We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
12. “The ocean is the lifeblood of our world. If we were to lose our fish that we appreciate so much by overfishing; or if we were to lose some of our favorite beaches to overbuilding and pollution, then how would we feel? It’s become a case of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
— Aaron Peirsol
13. “The health effects of air pollution imperil human lives. This fact is well-documented.”
— Eddie Bernice Johnson
14. “The strongest governments on earth cannot clean up pollution by themselves. They must rely on each ordinary person, like you and me, on our choices, and on our will.”
— Chai Jing
15. “I’m concerned that we don’t address the water pollution problems in other countries. If we move forward and don’t clean up the messes of the past, they’ll just get swept under the rug.”
— Erin Brockovich
16. “Trees face many difficulties, what with deforestation and pollution, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be one – to just stop feeling and live.”
— Emma Gonzalez
17. “To deal with these problems – of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty – we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature’s laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior.”
— Herbert A. Simon
18. “There are people who take rumors and embellish them in a way that can be devastating. And this pollution has to be eradicated by people in our business as best we can.”
— Bob Woodward
19. “The environmental effects of the automobile are well known: motor vehicles cause, for example, as much as 75 percent of the noise and 80 percent of the air pollution in our cities, and the industry must face mounting pressure from environmentalists.”
— Stewart Udall
20. “Putting a tax on carbon could be an effective approach for curbing global warming pollution.”
— Frances Beinecke
21. “Pollution from human activities is changing the Earth’s climate. We see the damage that a disrupted climate can do: on our coasts, our farms, forests, mountains, and cities. Those impacts will grow more severe unless we start reducing global warming pollution now.”
— Frances Beinecke
22. “Despite Arizona’s remarkable growth in recent years, we have met the current federal health standards for ozone pollution and the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved our dust control plan.”
— Jane D. Hull
23. “The legal fight over climate change begins in the United States with the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. Under the Act, the E.P.A. is required to publish a list of ‘stationary sources’ of air pollution, of which the most important are power plants.”
— Charles C. Mann
24. “Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history. It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society?”
— Rose George
25. “Safer chemicals and more energy-efficient technologies can provide cooling without severe climate implications. Shifting to these alternatives could avoid the equivalent of 12 times the current annual carbon pollution of the United States by 2050.”
— Frances Beinecke
26. “The Clean Air Act of 1970 was designed to control air pollution on a national level by authorizing the development of comprehensive regulations to limit emissions.”
— Christine Todd Whitman
27. “The challenge of pollution and global warming is no longer the science, or the rate of innovation, but the rate of implementation: We have the clean solutions; now let’s bundle them and install them.”
— Jens Martin Skibsted
28. “When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn’t get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public – the common earth.”
— Robert Kennedy, Jr.
29. “Ethanol has reduced our nation’s dependence on imported energy, created thousands of jobs, reduced air pollution, and increased energy security. And renewable fuels cost less at the pump. It is a growth fuel that fuels opportunities for millions of Americans.”
— Lane Evans
30. “The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.”
— B. F. Skinner
31. “It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”
— Dan Quayle
32. “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
33. “The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can’t breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.”
— Joe Biden
34. “Transportation is responsible for half of our state’s air pollution, and many suffer as a result. Children are more likely to develop respiratory illnesses and struggle in school when they breathe smoggy air.”
— Alex Padilla
35. “Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.”
— Barry Commoner
36. “The Environmental Protection Agency’s first-ever limits on carbon pollution from power plants will create clean- energy jobs, improve public health, bring greater reliability to our electric power grid, bolster our national security, demonstrate the United States’ resolve to combat climate change and maybe even reduce our utility bills.”
— Martin Luther King III
37. “Climate change and air pollution know no borders, and antibiotics resistance respects no boundaries. Bacteria from Africa can make people in America sick. The burning of Indonesian forests can keep Asia gasping for breath.”
— Rohini Nilekani
38. “We are estranged from our own deeper physiology because we are no longer in contact with nature. Instead, we are controlling nature with air pollution, heating, technology. But you have to know you have a depth within yourself which needs to be stimulated. If it doesn’t get stimulated it becomes weaker, like a muscle that’s not being used any more.”
— Wim Hof
39. “Like air pollution, flood risk is a threat that government should be protecting us against.”
— Barry Gardiner
40. “I always saw pollution as theft, and I always thought, ‘Why should somebody be able to pollute the air, which belongs to all of us, or destroy a river or a waterway, which is supposed to belong to the whole community?’”
— Robert Kennedy, Jr.
41. “I rant and rave about noise pollution.”
— Robert Carlyle
42. “Doing all we can to combat climate change comes with numerous benefits, from reducing pollution and associated health care costs to strengthening and diversifying the economy by shifting to renewable energy, among other measures.”
— David Suzuki
43. “The air pollution in Delhi has become a matter of public health concern nationally and internationally.”
— M. S. Swaminathan
44. “Pollution is a serious one. Water pollution, air pollution, and then solid hazardous waste pollution. And then beyond that, we also have the resources issue. Not just water resources but other natural resources, the mining resources being consumed, and the destruction of our ecosystem.”
— Ma Jun
45. “The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.”
— Theodore White
46. “Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy are all problems that are confronted by having cities. That’s where they – all these problems come from.”
— Geoffrey West
47. “Plastic doesn’t have to be ocean plastic pollution.”
— Boyan Slat
48. “Environmental pollution, terrorism, and many other global threats do not stop at borders. We all bear global responsibility and thus need a global identity to enable us to cope with them. We must learn to integrate different levels of identity in ourselves. What matters is not either/or, but both/and.”
— Klaus Schwab
49. “Food production is ripping the living world apart. Fishing and farming are, by a long way, the greatest cause of extinction and loss of the diversity and abundance of wildlife. Farming is a major cause of climate breakdown, the biggest cause of river pollution and a hefty source of air pollution.”
— George Monbiot
50. “Of course, as consumers, we want cheap and good products; however, if these production processes are exceeding wastewater discharge standards and even causing heavy metal pollution, they will cause long-lasting damage to the ecological environment and public health.”
— Ma Jun
51. “It’s not enough for one country or even a few countries to reduce emissions when other countries continue to fill the atmosphere with carbon pollution as they see fit.”
— John F. Kerry
52. “Today we’re dumping 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the environment, and tomorrow we will dump more, and there is no effective worldwide response. Until we start sharply reducing global-warming pollution, I will feel that I have failed.”
— Al Gore
53. “It’s no secret that the environmental movement is ultimately designed to create new inroads into increased government control. All of the shots taken at emissions, the dependence on fossil fuels, and noise pollution are designed to paint those things as symptoms of a problem, with the government able to step in as the solution.”
— Steven Crowder
54. “Years of government inaction on air pollution has got people thinking that the state cannot even protect basic public goods like clean air.”
— Barry Gardiner
55. “During the Cold War, workers proudly contributed to national defense, but the carelessness and haste in handling toxic waste created a nightmare of pollution for subsequent generations.”
— Bobbie Ann Mason
56. “We want people to tell us the possible steps that can be taken to save ourselves from the harmful effects of air pollution.”
— Arvind Kejriwal
57. “The risk of pollution exists for the infosphere as it does for the atmosphere. Freedom of the infosphere should thus become a law, and the Bible needs to have an 11th commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s data.”
— Hubert Burda
58. “Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.”
— Barry Commoner
59. “Every day I get to ‘Think’ and work on everything from digitizing electric grids so they can accommodate renewable energy and enable mass adoption of electric cars, helping major cities reduce congestion and pollution, to developing new micro-finance programs that help tiny businesses get started in markets such as Brazil, India, Africa.”
— Ginni Rometty
60. “We pay for power plant pollution through higher health costs.”
— Sheldon Whitehouse
