You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.

If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.

That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.