While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for theindividual, it isbestfor therace, becauseit insures thesurvival ofthefittest ineverydepartment. Weaccept and welcome, therefore, as conditions towhichwe must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race.

-Carnegie, Andrew
  'The Gospel of  Wealth', in the North  American Review,  Jun.

Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twentyand forty.

-Faulkner,William Harrison
  Interview in Paris Review, Spring.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment.We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

-Havel,Va¤  clav
  Speech,1  Jan.

President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.

-Jarrell, Randall
  Pictures from an Institution, pt.1, ch.4.

Nothing is more difficult than to determine what a child takes in, and does not take in, of its environment and its teaching. This fact is brought home to me by the hymns which I learned as a child, and never forgot. They mean more to me almost than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.

-Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)
Collected in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works (1968).

The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinese wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible.

-Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl
  The Problems of China.

It is exciting to have a real crisis onyour hands, when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment.

-Thatcher, Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness
  Of the Falklands conflict. Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference,14 May.

Too many†pass judgement on wartime decisions in the luxury of a peacetime environment.

-Truman, Harry S
  Reply to a Boston University official who had criticized Truman's use of the atomic bomb.Truman Library archives, 23 Sep.