Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.

The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.