Quotes About Coal

“And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay"
"Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.”

— John Denver

“He also could feel it in his nostrils like an impalpable soot; the emanations of the millions about them, packed away at night in layers like martins in martin boxes and by day wriggling and squirming down between the tall buildings like larvae enclosed within the ribs of a dead horse; and with this effluvia of humans, the taint of burnt gasoline and burnt lubricating oils and the smoke and the coal grit and the dirt motes that were churned and rechurned and never at rest- the Pollen of the City.”

— Irvin S. Cobb

“A coal miner from Chongjin whom I met in 2004 in China told me, People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our terrible situation. We all know we think that and we all know that everybody else thinks that. We don't need to talk about it.”

— Barbara Demick

“I walked up to the side of the mountain like I used to do when I was a little boy. I looked out over Rainelle and watched it shine. The coal trucks and the logging trucks were still gunning it through town. They were still clear cutting the mountains and cutting the coal from the ground. Then I heard my mother calling and it was like I was a child again.”

— Scott McClanahan

“Wood was the main source of energy in the world until the eighteen-fifties, and it still could be. Roughly a tenth of the annual growth of all the trees on earth could yield alcohol enough to run everything that now uses coal and petroleum-every airplane, every industry, every automobile.”

— John McPhee

“In 1950 the European Union was officially born in the form of a German-dominated cartel of coal and steel, run of course by a cross-border French-dominated administration located in Brussels. Its name? The European Steel and Coal Community.”

— Yanis Varoufakis

“Edward didn't know what he was thinking, asking her about marriage. He wasn't a damned viscount. He refused to be one. And whatever odd flutterings he may have felt in her presence, whatever odd imaginings he had harbored, he wasn't going to marry her.
And yet ... It was tempting, too. While he hadn't been paying attention, his mind had constructed a might-have-been, a world where he'd never been cast out, where he'd never had to make his heart as black and hard as coal. If he'd been Edward Delacey, he might have courted her in his own right. Edward Delacey, dead fool that he was, could have had the one thing that Edward Clark never would.”

— Courtney Milan

“If 98 out of 100 doctors tell me I've got a problem, I should take their advice. And if those two other doctors get paid by Big Snack Food, like certain climate deniers get paid by Big Coal, I shouldn't take their advice.”

— Al Franken

“Cutting edge technologies have allowed us to utilize coal's diverse potentials. Not only are we using coal in cleaner and more environmentally sound methods, but importantly, we can turn coal into gasoline and diesel.”

— Peter Roskam

“Today's vote ensures that coal will continue to be an important part of our nation's energy policy, with strong parameters to make it cleaner and more efficient.”

— Ron Lewis

“Coal companies have a lot of power in the media, and unfortunately a lot of information doesn't get out.”

— Kevin Richardson

“I didn't even watch the soaps when I was in them because it's like a coal miner coming home and staring at the coal scuttle - I was never a great lover of watching myself act.”

— Ross Kemp

“I used to dig around the sandbox and pull out pieces of coal and show them to my mother, and she used to say that's how I must have known I was going to be a geologist.”

— Richard Mourdock

“So many humans. So many colors. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-colored clouds, beating like black hearts. And then. There is death.”

— Markus Zusak

“In that sense, I became politicized because the people in the coal mining villages who were involved in the struggle knew why they were there. But they couldn't understand why some pop star from London would want to be there.”

— Billy Bragg

“Born Virginia Marshall but nicknamed Gig, my mother was a home economics teacher who had come all the way across the whole state of Virginia, from her home on the Eastern Shore to our little Appalachian coal town to marry my daddy, Ernest Smith, whose family had lived in these mountains for generations.”

— Lee Smith

“Here in the United States, we have between 250 and 300 years of a coal supply. That is more than the amount of recoverable oil contained in the entire world.”

— Tim Holden

“I grew up around some great philosophers: they were coal miners and cowboys born in the 1920s. They were also vets of World War II. Listen to your elders, there isn't any better wisdom for you.”

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

“The atmosphere does not fathom whether CO2 comes from U.S. oil or Chinese coal, nor do hurricanes lose force because the Heritage Foundation doesn't believe global warming is a problem. Living systems operate on laws over which we have no say.”

— Paul Hawken

“As a member of both the energy and environment committees, I am constantly astounded by how many of my colleagues prefer to focus on what the government can do for the nuclear or coal industries rather than why the government should support clean and sustainable energy.”

— Bernie Sanders

“The industrial stomach cannot live without coal; industry is a carbonivorous animal and must have its proper food.”

— Jules Verne

“The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“Americans don't pay much attention to environmental issues, because they aren't sexy. I mean, cleaning up coal plants and reining in outlaw frackers is hugely important work, but it doesn't get anybody's pulse racing.”

— Jeff Goodell

“In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word 'coal' is a remarkable and unprecedented event.”

— Jeff Goodell

“Even the biggest coal boosters have long admitted that coal is a dying industry - the fight has always been over how fast and how hard the industry will fall.”

— Jeff Goodell

“For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia - and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs.”

— Jeff Goodell

“The greatest natural resource our country has is not oil. It's not gas. It's not coal. It's the genius of our children.”

— Cory Booker

“The morning has broken - I had thought of the morning like an egg that had split with a crack and was spreading. Before us lay all the green of the green country of England, with its rivers and it's roads and it's hedges, it's churches, it's chimneys, it's rising threads of smoke. The chimneys grew taller, the roads and rivers wider, the threads of smoke more thick, the farther off the country spread; until at last, at the farthest point of all, they made a smudge, a stain, a darkness - a darkness, like the darkness of the coal in a fire - a darkness that was broken, here and there, where the sun caught panes of glass and the golden tips of domes and steeples, with glittering points of light.
'London,' I said 'Oh, London!”

— Sarah Waters

“The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.
It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.
The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.
("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes")”

— Cornell Woolrich

“If there is one man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner.”

— George Orwell

“I left school when I was 16; then I worked for my father, who was a welder. And I was a welder for three years, you know, welder of fabrication, metal 'cause it was a big industrial town, Sheffield. It was much steel and coal and stuff like that.”

— Sean Bean

“Looking for a gem, we are sometimes dumb enough to try to hold on to a lump of coal, convinced that it will turn into a diamond in our lifetime ... but all it does it get sh*t all over you until you burn it and use the energy for something else.”

— Ingrid Weir

“Not exactly. You see, Portia and I think that the coal miner thing's very overdone. No one will remember you in that. And we both see it has our job to make District 12 tributes unforgettable,' says Cinna.
I'll be naked for sure, I think.
'So rather than focus on the coal mining itself, we're going to focus on the coal,' says Cinna.
Naked and covered in black dust, i think.
'And what do we do with coal? We burn it,' says Cinna. 'You're not afraid of fire, are you, Katniss?' He sees my expression and grins.”

— Suzanne Collins

“As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.”

— Suzanne Collins

“There are really only two stories the coal industry tells: "Coal keeps the lights on, and by implication, you'll live in medieval, soul-shattering darkness if you don't let us do whatever the hell we want with the landscape and drinking water you public health, because there's no alternative."”

— Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“It's like holding a hot coal in your hand, it just burns you, it doesn't do me any good.”

— Joe Lauzon

“If there were to be a Labor-Greens government, that would be the end of the Adani mine, that would be the end of coal mining in central Queensland, and that would be the end of their best shot at economic prosperity in the future.”

— George Brandis

“But just [proposing the standard] puts companies on notice that if you're looking to construct a new natural-gas or coal facility, you really need to pay attention to these. This is what they should be designing new facilities toward as soon as this proposal hits the streets.”

— Gina McCarthy

“Wrong location? Move it. Wrong people? Replace 'em. Wrong industry? I don't believe it. I've got a company in the machine tools industry, and we're doing great. I'd happily go into the coal business. It's how you look at something and how it's managed that make the difference.”

— Ken Hendricks

“If youre a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”

— Al Gore

“The misconception that there is serious disagreement among scientists about global warming is actually an illusion that has been deliberately fostered by a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and utilities companies. These companies want to prevent any new policies that would interfere with their current business plans that rely on the massive unrestrained dumping of global warming pollution into the Earth's atmosphere every hour of every day.”

— Al Gore

“Goals and caps on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air.”

— James Hansen

“We're headed for what is called Type 1 Civilization, planetary civilization. Type 2 would be stellar civilization, like Star Trek. Type 3 Civilization would be galactic, like Star Wars. We are Type 0. We get our energy from dead plants, oil and coal. But the question is: Will we make it? Will we make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1? It's not clear.”

— Michio Kaku

“Coal miners don't get coal miners' block.”

— John Green

“Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.”

— P. J. O'Rourke

“Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness ... and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men.”

— Camille Paglia

“There's no free lunch. If you want an industrial economy, you need energy. If you want energy, it will produce pollution. You can have it in two forms. You can have it dissipated in the atmosphere - like carbon dioxide - which then you cannot recover, or you can have the waste concentrated in one small space like nuclear. That is far easier to deal with. The idea that you can be able to create renewable energy at a price anywhere near the current price for oil or gas or coal is a fantasy.”

— Charles Krauthammer

“I have visited sweatshops, factories, and crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it. The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of ... individualism, conquest and exploitation ... A social order such as this, built upon such wrong and basic principles, is bound to retard the development of all. The output of a cotton mill or a coal mine is considered of greater importance than the production of healthy, happy-hearted and free human beings. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name.”

— Helen Keller

“Coal is not dear for the coal-miner who can use it there and then, nor is khadi dear for the villager who manufactures his own khadi.”

— Mahatma Gandhi