If we human beings learn to see the intricacies that bind one part of a natural system to another and then to us, we will no longer argue about the importance of wilderness protection, or over the question of saving endangered species, or how human communities must base their economic futures – not on short-term exploitation – but on long-term, sustainable development.
- Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day

If we learn, finally, that what we need to “manage” is not the land so much as ourselves in the land, we will have turned the history of American land-use on its head.
- Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day

"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us."
- Theodore Roosevelt, speech,  Washington, D.C., 1900

"We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.  But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy."
- Wallace Stegner

"We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste.  An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product.  We need a peaceable economy."
- Wendell Berry, Thoughts in the Presence of Fear.

"God bless America. Let's save some of it."
- Edward Abbey

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."
- Ansel Adams

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."
- Audubon

"No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force."
- Liberty Hyde Bailey

"What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself."
- Mollie Beattie, Director, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from 1993-1996

"To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival."
- Wendell Berry

"The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter."
- Hal Borland, New York Times Book Review, 25 February 1964

"You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush."
- John Burroughs

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of a least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."
- Rachel Carson, naturalist and author

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
- Rachel Carson

"In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught."
- Baba Dioum, Senegalese poet

"Man shapes himself through the decisions that shape his environment."
- Rene Dubos

"We are cutting out our kidneys to enlarge our stomachs."
- Eric Freyfogle, Illinois law professor, on the destruction of wetlands, Baltimore Evening Sun, 12 September 1991

"Till now man has been up against nature, from now on he will be up against his own nature."
- Dennis Gabor

"We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves and we are nature. We are nature, seeing nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature."
- Susan Griffin, Women and Nature

"It is our task in our time and in our generation, to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours."
- John F. Kennedy

"If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers."
- Joseph Wood Krutch

"Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm."
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land."
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

"For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death."
- Tom McMillan

"Let us... permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we."
- Michel de Montaigne

"There is growing awareness of the beauty of country ... a sincere desire to keep some of it for all time. People are beginning to value highly the fact that a river runs unimpeded for a distance... They are beginning to obtain deep satisfaction from the fact that a herd of elk may be observed in back country, on ancestral ranges, where the Indians once hunted them. They are beginning to seek the healing relaxation that is possible in wild country. In short, they want it."
- Olaus J. Murie, naturalist, writer and co-founder of The Wilderness Society

"The purpose of conservation: The greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time."
- Gifford Pinchot, first Director of the U.S. Forest Service

"Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it."
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1903

"We can never have enough of nature."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

"The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing."
- Loudon Wainwright

"I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better change of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially."
- E.B. White