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Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.

--Aldo Leopold

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

--La Rouchefoucauld

If I've made myself too clear, you must have misunderstood me."

--Alan Greenspan, Chairman, US Federal Reserve Board

When the land begins to be regarded, not as the primary source of wealth, but as the plaything of gentlemen already rich, the economy of the country is in questionable, if not dangerous condition.

--Gerald W. Johnson

You know, they call it the Dust Bowl now. You see, folks, what we're learning today now is that you can rob from nature just the same way you can rob from any individual. It ain't just robbin' from nature. It's robbin' from future generations.

--Will Rogers

The developer of a new idea may be described as having 'plowed new ground', yet the plowshare may well have destroyed more options for future generations than the sword.

--Wes Jackson

The grass roots which formerly held the soil together are decayed and gone, and now, when loosened by the plow, the soil is easily drifted and blown away.

Dr A M Ten Eyck, 1911

It takes a rich land to support a democracy. Every time you see a dust cloud, or a muddy stream, a field scarred by erosion or a channel choked with silt, you are witnessing the passing of democracy. The crop called man can wither like any other.

--Sterling North

They claim this Mother Earth of ours for their own and fence their neighbors away from them... They compel the natural earth to produce more excessively and when it fails, they force it to take medicine to produce more. This is evil.

--Sitting Bull 1877

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you please unless it causes others harm. With it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

--P.J. O'Rourke

To put the bounty and the health of our land, our only commonwealth, into the hands of people who do not live on it and share its fate will always be an error. For whatever determines the fortune of the land determines also the fortune of the people.

--Wendell Berry

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

--Thomas Paine

"The general attitude of the New Age seems to be undiscriminating, and even to be against the whole idea of discrimination."
When confronted with factual information that challenges cherished beliefs, "the average New Age person reacts by simply not wanting to talk to you any more - you have the wrong attitude and possibly the wrong vibrations."

--John Rowan, author and psychotherapist

People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart.
             --Howard Simons, "The Washington Post"

"It is well understood that nothing so excites the glands of a free-market capitalist as the offer of a government subsidy."

Political democracy can endure only as the guardian of economic democracy, as I am by no means the first to say

I can remember when a good politician had to be 75 percent ability and 25 percent actor, but I can well see the day when the reverse could be true.

Moderation in temper is always a virtue;
        --but moderation in principle is always a vice.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

The more time you spend in reporting on what you're doing the less time you have to do anything. Stability is achieved when you spend all your time doing nothing but reporting on the nothing you are doing.

Amendment X:
        --The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.

Although I can accept talking scarecrows, lions and great wizards of emerald cities, I find it hard to believe there is no paperwork involved when your house lands on a witch.

Where the creation of paper waste is concerned, technology is proving to be not so much a contraceptive as a fertility drug.

We should be thankful for the good things we have and, also, for the bad things we don't have.

Save the whales. Collect the whole set.

It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples.

"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

There's a fine line between courage and foolishness.

Don't worry about biting off more than you can chew. Your mouth is probably a whole lot bigger than you think.

May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men

The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor .....and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

Macintosh

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

One nice thing about egotists: They don't talk about other people.

Ten two letter words to live by:
        -- If it is to be it is up to me.

If you wish to live wisely, ignore sayings

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them... you are a mile away AND you have their shoes.

The mockingbird can change its tune eighty-seven times in seven minutes. Politicians regard this interesting fact with envy.

Mathematicians are the least expensive researchers to support. All they need are pencils, paper, and a wastebasket

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
        --

In times of change, it is the learners who will inherit the earth while the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.

Redmond, WA

Our model citizen is a sophistocate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man, a presumption not supported by all the facts.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.

In central government culture, agencies and all, The career structure is largely colonial, where movement towards the centre is regarded as advancement. This does not relate to rural situations, where movement towards home is more diffucult, but infinitely more worthwhile.

By now it should be pretty obvious that central planning is of a piece with absentee ownership and does not work.

All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city.

Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.

"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right."

Assessing the evidence which has accumulated over many years has convinced us that anything which is good for Big Business is bad for individuals and communities.

Not all landscapes should be inhabited by human beings, but each of us is enriched to the extent that we can belong to, and participate in, a well-ordered human community integrated into the natural landscape of a particular place.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army may also at last be brought against a standing government.

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe-"That government is best which governs not at all"

We are often cautioned that we must live in the 'real world' by folk who mean 'money', a concept more abstract than theoretical physics.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated.

An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, ...and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised.

I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.

Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear.

We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.

How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heaven and of Earth!

They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors.

It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all sides.

We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me.

Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under these circumstances- have our own thoughts to cheer us?

Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors."

Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground;
        -- indeed they were not easily to be put off.

Do what you love, and the money will follow...

We are advised to live in the real world by those who mean the economic world, the most abstract concept yet devised by humankind.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.

Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

I come more and more to look on each creature as living at the center - one of the infinite number of centers - of an arrangement of processes that reaches through the universe.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

The rooster crows but the hen produces.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

Most people are on the world, not in it. - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them -undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

A man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or believing he does - can live decently even in the understanding that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its complexity.

In wildness is the preservation of the world

The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of seeming a fool.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

There is no reason to believe that the Truth, when found will prove to be interesting

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with all other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

The greatest beauty is organic wholeness,
        --the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.
        --Love that, not man apart from that.

We tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation.

None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

O wad som pow'r the giftie gie us
        --To see oursels as others see us!
        --It wad frae monie a blunder free us, an' foolish notion.

It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our humanity.

I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.

Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

There is not a "fragment" in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.

Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill.

Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring , thundering waves and floods, the silent uproot of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

One touch of nature...makes all the world kin.

Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.

Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings ever by their accents alone.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American education is that students come away unable to distinguish between a symbol and the thing the symbol stands for.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

In any non-trivial axiomatic system, there are true theorems which cannot be proven.

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

One day's exposure to mountains is better than carloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.

With each passing year, because of advances in computer technology, there are more things, each more sophisticated, that we aren't allowed to do any more.

We do not inherit the land, we borrow it from our children.

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

Life is what happens to us while we're making other plans.

Be careful while reading health books, you might die of a misprint.

Man is the only animal that blushes

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

It has been said that the primary function of schools is to impart enough facts to make children stop asking questions. Some, with whom the schools do not succeed, become scientists.

No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening - still all is Beauty!

If you really want to be lonely, get married.

The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

A person who won't think has no advantage over one who can't think.

Going to the mountains is going home.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

Truth never damages a cause that is just.

Brought into right relationships with the wilderness, man would see that his appropriation of Earth's resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate loss and poverty by all.

Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw

Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes - all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life....

Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words.

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