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Rene Dubos Quotes

Microbiologist

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Famous Rene Dubos Quotes

“Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.”

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Book:Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet: an Unofficial Report Commissioned by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment
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“The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.”

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Author:Rene Dubos
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“Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.”

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Author:Rene Dubos
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“Pathological states are the consequence of several determinate factors acting simultaneously...The manifestations of any given agent differ profoundly from one person to another. ...Each noxious agent can express itself by a great variety of different pathological states. ...Different agents can elicit similar reactions. ...The total environment and the (interior medium) constitute a multifactorial system.”

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Author:Rene Dubos
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“As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence.”

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Book:Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change
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