"To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken." -- Leo Tolstoy
"The old Lakota was wise, He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too."
-- Luther Standing Bear
"The mountains are calling and I must go."
-- John Muir
"A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself."
-- Edward Abbey
"Only after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only then you will find out that money cannot be eaten."
- Cree Indian Prophecy
"If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future."
- Terry Tempest Williams
"Humanity is cutting down its forests, apparently oblivious to the fact that we may not be able to live without them."
-- Isaac Asimov
"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth."
-- Bible, Isaiah 5:8
"Study Nature, not books"
-- Louis Agassiz
"It is our task, in our time and in our generation, to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours."
-- John F. Kennedy
"We believe that ugliness begets ugliness and that nature's beauty, once destroyed, may never be restored by the artifice of man."
-- Carl Carmer
"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of our technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."
-- President Lyndon B. Johnson, upon signing The Wilderness Act of 1964
"Nature is not a place to visit, it is home..."
--Gary Snyder
"This we know. The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family... Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
-- Chief Sealth (Seattle)
"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."
-- Winston Churchill
"The key to intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts."
-- Aldo Leopold
"Always drink upstream from the herd."
-- Will Rogers
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
-- Winston Churchill
"I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast."
-- W.C. Fields
"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most."
-- Mark Twain
"I'm not out here to win a beauty contest."
-- Kirk Gibson
“I tried being reasonable, I didn't like it.”
-- Clint Eastwood
"Some guy hit my fender, and I told him, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' but not in those words."
-- Woody Allen
"In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that he did not also limit his stupidity."
-- Konrad Adenauer
"Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country."
-- Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C.
"I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue."
-- Richard Nixon, discussing Watergate in 1978
"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life."
-- Brooke Shields
“Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid.”
-- John Wayne
"Sure, it's going to kill a lot of people, but they may be dying of something else anyway."
-- Othal Brand, member of a Texas pesticide review board, on Chlordane.
"Honest businessmen should be protected from the unscrupulous consumer."
-- Lester Maddox, then governer of Georgia, on why his state should not create a consumer protection agency.
- Quotes