How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!

Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

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.

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.