Third, there is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called 'sportsmanship'. Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is the voluntary limitation in the use of these armaments. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of Gadgets in the pursuit of wild things.

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

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!

Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.

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.

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.

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