Luther Burbank

"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind."

"We must return to nature and nature's god."

"I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillment only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection."

"The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love."

"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul."

"Science is knowledge arranged and classified according to truth, facts, and the general laws of nature."

"If you violate Nature's laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman."

"If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed."

"If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction then ... life is on the road toward misfortune misery and destruction."

"Flowers always make people better happier and more helpful they are sunshine food and medicine to the soul."

"Heredity is nothing but stored environment."

"The greatest happiness in the world is to make others happy."

"It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while."

"The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead."

"Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check--agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution."

"I love humanity, which has been a constant delight to me during all my seventy-seven years of life; and I love flowers, trees, animals, and all the works of Nature as they pass before us in time and space. What a joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature, helping her to produce for the benefit of mankind new forms, colors, and perfumes in flowers which were never known before; fruits in form, size, and flavor never before seen on this globe; and grains of enormously increased productiveness, whose fat kernels are filled with more and better nourishment, a veritable storehouse of perfect food—new food for all the world's untold millions for all time to come."

"Scientists gladly accept any new truth demonstrated by evidence, that is, proved by the very law of the cosmos. Not so with any new conceptions of religion; these are fought by the use of persecution and venom. Many of the current religious beliefs literally carried into practice would stampede humanity into the old jungle ideas and habits."

"The chief trouble with religion has been too much dependence upon names or words. People fail to discriminate. They do not think. Generally people who think for themselves, instead of thinking according to the rules laid down by others, are considered unfaithful to the established order. In that respect I, too, differ with the established order and established designations."

"Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also should introduce a clause to prevent the use of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope or any other instrument of precision which may in the future be invented, constructed or used for the discovery of truth."

"A theory of personal resurrection or reincarnation of the individual is untenable when we but pause to consider the magnitude of the idea. On the contrary, I must believe that rather than the survival of all, we must look for survival only in the spirit of the good we have done in passing through. Once obsolete, an automobile is thrown to the scrap heap. Once here and gone, the human life has likewise served its purpose. If it has been a good life, it has been sufficient. There is no need for another."