20th-century Botanist Quotes

Terence McKenna
G. Ledyard Stebbins
William T. Stearn
Wes Jackson
Jonathan Ott

We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.

Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna
[Children] use up the same part of my head as poetry does. To deal with children is a matter of terrific imaginative identification. And the children have to come first. It's no use putting off their evening meal for two months.

As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.

Wes Jackson
Wes Jackson
The progress of botany, as of other sciences, comes from the interaction of so many factors that undue emphasis on any one can give a very distorted impression of the whole, but certainly among the most important of these for any given period are the prevailing ideas and intellectual attitudes, the assumptions and stimuli of the time, for often upon them depends the extent to which a particular study attracts an unbroken succession of men of industry and originality intent on building a system of knowledge and communicating it successfully to others of like mind.

William T. Stearn
William T. Stearn
I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world.

G. Ledyard Stebbins
G. Ledyard Stebbins
In my view, the only recourse for a scientist concerned about the social consequences of his work is to remain involved with it to the end.

I firmly believe that contemporary spiritual use of entheogenic drugs is one of humankind's brightest hopes for overcoming the ecological crisis from which we threaten the biosphere and jeopardize our own survival, for Homo sapiens is close to the head of the list of endangered species.

Jonathan Ott
Jonathan Ott
I have never regretted our foolhardiness. Of course, we made mistakes, endless mistakes, but at least they were our own, just as the garden was our own.

A student who can weave his technology into the fabric of society can claim to have a liberal education; a student who cannot weave his technology into the fabric of society cannot claim even to be a good technologist.