American Botanist Quotes

David Starr Jordan

Asa Gray

George Washington Carver

Luther Burbank

John Bartram

Liberty Hyde Bailey

Terence McKenna

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.

Life can be studied fruitfully in its highest as well as its lowest manifestations. The biochemist can tell us much about protoplasmic organisation, but so can the artist. Life is the business of the poet as well as of the physiologist.

Edmund Ware Sinnott

I hope by these practical observations [of cross fertilization] to open a gate into a very large field of experimental knowledge, which, if judiciously improved, may be a considerable addition to the beauty of the florist's garden.

We are not called upon to construct a theory of the universe even upon every well-attested fact, and the sooner this is learned the more time will be saved and the more functional will the observing powers remain.

John Merle Coulter

Nature produces individuals and nothing more

Charles Edwin Bessey

One of the redeeming features of rubbish heaps, ballast grounds and waste lands is that they furnish a lurking place for numerous wanderers and outcasts of the vegetable kingdom.

Willard Nelson Clute

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.

Every species of plant is a law unto itself.

Henry A. Gleason (botanist)

Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized.

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

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

Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of truth as they would a cold bath.

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.

Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.

Tools of many kinds and well chosen, are one of the joys of a garden.

Liberty Hyde Bailey

Inspiration is never at variance with information; in fact the more information one has, the greater will be the inspiration.

George Washington Carver

The creation of man or the growth of a state is as natural as the formation of an apple or the growth of a snowbank. All are alike supernatural, for they all rest on the huge unseen solidity of the universe, the imperishability of matter, the conservation of energy, and the immanence of law.

David Starr Jordan