We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

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

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.

I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment.

I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.

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 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.