Quotes By James Lovelock

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.

For each of our actions there are only consequences.

Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.

The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits, so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power.

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

I'm not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.

Science always uses metaphor.

There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.

Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.

We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn't surprise me at all.

One pound of uranium is worth about 3 million pounds worth of coal or oil.

Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.

You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don't say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

Let's make hay while it lasts.

All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.

Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.

I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.

Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.