Helen Caldicott Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Trees are really upside-down lungs: their trunks are equivalent to the trachea, their branches to the right and left main bronchi, and all their branching twigs and leaves to small bronchi and alveoli, or air sacs, where the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place.

Helen Caldicott
The U.S. population, a mere four or five percent of the world total, creates half the world's toxic waste.

Helen Caldicott
The whole world is being 'deculturalized' into a uniform 'Coca-Cola society,' wanting and needing an American way of life.

Helen Caldicott
Trees are more than just havens for animals, birds, insects, and humans; they are also the lungs of the earth. Just as we breathe oxygen into our lungs and exhale carbon dioxide, so trees breathe carbon dioxide into their leaves and exhale oxygen.

Helen Caldicott
The problem with addicted people, communities, corporations, or countries is that they tend to lie, cheat, or steal to get their 'fix.' Corporations are addicted to profit and governments to power.

Helen Caldicott
In terms of the biology of the planet, development is a euphemism for destruction.

Helen Caldicott
As a physician, I see the earth as a patient in the intensive care unit. We have an acute clinical crisis on our hands and must take urgent action. My prescription for survival is that the American people rise up as they did in the 1980s, when 80 percent of Americans supported the nuclear weapons freeze.

Helen Caldicott
We are the curators of life on earth; we hold it in the palms of our hands.

Helen Caldicott
I recently watched a filmed launching of an MX missile. It rose slowly out of the ground, surrounded by smoke and flames and elongated into the air — it was indeed a very sexual sight, and when armed with the ten warheads it will explode with the most almighty orgasm.

Helen Caldicott
Politics is not really politics any more. It is run, for the most part, by Madison Avenue advertising firms, who sell politicians to the public the way they sell bars of soap or cans of beer.

Helen Caldicott
The massive quantities of radiation that would be released in a war fought with nuclear weapons might, over time, cause such great changes in the human gene pool that following generations might not be recognizable as human beings.

Helen Caldicott
Terrorists do not actually need nuclear weapons. They have been conveniently supplied with 103 nuclear power plants scattered throughout the United States (438 of these deadly facilities exist throughout the world). A planned meltdown at one of these facilities would make the World Trade Center attacks seem like child's play. The massive concrete containers protecting the reactors are not strong enough to withstand the impact of a jumbo jet.

Helen Caldicott