One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.

Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.

If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.

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!

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

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.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.