Birds, butterflies, and flowers
All make one band of paramours.

-William Wordsworth, "Green Linnet"

"There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all are derived from inanimate things: books, pictures, and the face of nature."

-William Hazlitt

"The sad truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which thy are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume. Whosoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found... Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena--care not to understand the architecture of the Heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!"

-Herbert Spencer

"You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back."

-Horace (65­8 B.C.) Epistles, 1.10

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

-Greek proverb

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, "First Fig"

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught."

-Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist

"Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping cranes in higher esteem than people. It is up to science to spread the understanding that the choice is not between wild places or people. Rather, it is between a rich or an impoverished existence for Man."

-Thomas E. Lovejoy, World Wildlife Fund

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

-Helen Keller

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

-Susan Ertz, "Anger in the Sky" (1943)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless,
Christmas dinner's dark and blue,
When you stop and try to see it
From the turkey's point of view.

Sunday dinner isn't funny
Easter feasts are just bad luck,
When you see it from the viewpoint
Of the chicken or the duck.

Oh, how I once loved tuna salad,
Pork and lobsters, lamb chops, too,
Till I stopped and looked at dinner
From the dinner's point of view.

-Shel Silverstein, "Point of View"

"On the subject of wild mushrooms, it is easy to tell who is an expert and who is not: The expert is the one who is still alive."

-Donal Henahan

“I have endeavored to guard myself against the enthusiastic partiality which believes our civilization to be the most precious thing that we possess or could acquire, and thinks it must inevitably lead us to undreamt-of heights of perfection. I can at any rate listen without taking umbrage to those critics who aver that when one surveys the aims of civilization and the means it employs, one is bound to conclude that the whole thing is not worth the effort and that in the end it can only produce a state of things which no individual will be able to bear.”

-Sigmund Freud, Civilization And Its Discontents

"When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash ‹at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the Œnewness,¹ the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance."

-Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

"I care not for a man's religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it"

-Lincoln

"Without speculation, there is no original observation."

-Charles Darwin in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace

the aim of life is to live and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware

-Henry Miller

"live in beauty... see in beauty... go in beauty..."

-Black Elk

"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."

-Thomas Edison, Harpers Magazine, 1890

"Volunteers are the backbone, heart, and soul of the restoration movement. And whatever the eventual results of their labors may be, working to revive damaged ecosystems is transforming and strengthening their relationship with the rest of nature."

-William K. Stevens, Miracle Under the Oaks

"I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn."

-Henry David Thoreau

"The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet."

-John F. Kennedy

"Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that. No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

"...a monkey could climb into the jungle canopy at the foothills of the Andes and swing through 2,000 miles of continuous 200-foot-high forest before reaching the Atlantic coast."

-Eugene Linden, "Playing with Fire", Time, September 18, 1989

"I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines."

-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)"

-Daniel Dennett, "Consciousness Explained"

COGDELL, GA : The Cogdell School Board banned the teaching of the controversial "Theory Of Math" in its schools Monday. "We are simply not confident of this mysterious process by which numbers turn, as if by magic, into other numbers," board member Gus Reese said. "Those mathematicians are free to believe 3 times 4 equals 12, but that dun [sic] give them the right to force it on our children." Under the new ruling, all math textbooks will carry a disclaimer noting that math is only one of many valid theories of number-manipulation.

-Georgia School Board Bans 'Theory Of Math", TheOnion

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at begin to change."

-Wayne Dyer

"All cold-blooded animals...spend an unexpectedly large proportion of their time doing nothing at all, or at any rate nothing in particular."

-Charles Elton

"Those who are really awake to the sights and sounds which the procession of the months offers them, find endless entertainment and instruction. Yet there are great multitudes who are present at as many as threescore and ten performances, without ever really looking at the scenery, or listening to the music, or observing the chief actors."

-O. W. Holmes

"If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another."

-Winston Churchill

"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence."

-Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

"Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge."

-Thomas Edison

"What happened, what we think happened in distant memory, is built around a small collection of dominating images. In one of my own from the age of seven, I stand in the shallows of Paradise Beach, staring down at a huge jellyfish in water so still and clear that its every detail is revealed as though it were trapped in glass."

-Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist

"In fact, if there is any lesson I have learned in my years of following science, it is that nothing is as it seems. Instead, things are as they seem plus the details you are just beginning to notice. New truths rarely overturn old ones, they simply add nuanced brushstrokes to the portrait."

-Natalie Angier, "The Beauty of the Beastly"

"To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls and feeds itself over and over again."

-Gretel Ehrlich, "River History"

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life: so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."

-Matt Cartmill.

"What is the origin of the urge, the fascincation that drives physicists, mathematicians, and presumably other scientists as well? Psychoanalysis suggests that it is sexual curiosity. You start by asking where little babies come from, one thing leads to another, and you find yourself preparing nitroglycerine or solving differential equations. This explanation is somewhat irritating, and therefore probably basically correct."

-David Ruelle, "Chance and Chaos"

"The vast possibilities of our great future will become realities only if we make ourselves responsible for that future."

-Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the U.S. Forest Service

Dec. 23

"But what pleasure it is to know that there is back county for them to retreat to, that nobody is going to push roads through that wilderness, that no RVs or trail bikes or tote goats will roar through those forests and stink up that clean air. The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls' good, but leave no tracks."

-Wallace Stegner, Crossing Into Eden, 1989

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."

-Francis Bacon

At Christmas play and make good cheere,
For Christmas comes but once a yeere.

-Tusser, "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry"

Heap on the wood!-the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our Christmas merry still.

-Sir Walter Scott

"But if there is a more worthy aim for us than to be drudges--if there are other uses in the things around us than their power to bring money--if there are higher faculties to be exercised than acquisitive and sensual ones--if the pleasures which poetry and art and science and philosophy can bring are of any moment--then it is desirable that the instinctive inclination which every child shows to observe natural beauties and investigate natural phenomena should be encouraged."

-Herbert Spencer, Education

"I remember Mimi asking me as a child to make a lens by curling my fingers around to my thumb. I closed one eye and, with the other, looked through my hand lens. I played with scale. Blades of grass were transformed into trees, a gravel bed became a boulder field. Small rivulets pouring over moss became the great rivers of our continent. My world was my own creation. It still is."

-Terry Tempest Williams

"The environmental and human effects of the modern way of thinking and structuring of relationships has been near-catastrophic, weakening ecosystems, and undermining the stability and sustainability of human communities. The great challenge that lies ahead of us is to come to grips with the dark side of the modern worldview‹to address the cold evil that comes of reducing all of nature and life to commercial resources that can be technologically mediated, manipulated, and reconstructed to suit the narrow objectives of utilitarianism and market efficiency."

-Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

Dec. 30

"When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer."

-Dave Barry

"Something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for, are the true essentials of a happy and meaningful life."

-David Goodman

Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings a tune without words
And never stops at all.
And sweetest, in the gale, is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That keeps so many warm.
I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet, never, in extremity
It ask a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickinson

"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."

-William Beebe, 1906

"Every child is born a naturalist. His eyes are, by nature, open to the glories of the stars, the beauty of the flowers, and the mystery of life."

-R. Search

"Science is not the only way, nor always the best way, to gain an understanding of the world in which we find ourselves... You don't need calculus to tell you whether a symphony or a poem has meaning for you. Science complements these other ways of knowing."

-from Science Matters, by Hazen and Trefil

"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."

-Eisenhower's farewell speech, 1961

"For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver."

-Martin Luther

"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

-William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

"As a general rule, a modern biologist seeing an animal doing something to benefit another assumes either that it is being manipulated by the other individual or that it is being subtly selfish."

-George Williams

"There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century: the atom, the computer, and the gene."

-Harold Varmus, Director, US National Institute of Health

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

-Steven Weinberg

"The brain is a three pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light-years across."

-Marian C. Diamond

"And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him."

-Jack London, The Call of the Wild

I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach;
But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech.
Hold to thine ear
And plain thou'lt hear
Tales of ships.

-Charles Henry (John Paul) Webb (1834-1905), "With a Nantucket Shell"

"Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe."

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Over the past 12 years I have learned that a tree needs space to grow, that coyotes sing down by the creek in January, that I can drive a nail into oak only when it is green, that bees know more about making honey than I do, that love can become sadness, and that there are more questions than answers."

-Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

"Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There was a revolution in biology in the mid 1960s, pioneered especially by two men, George Williams and William Hamilton. This revolution is best known by Richard Dawkins's phrase 'The Selfish Gene', and at its core lies the idea that individuals do not consistently do things for the good of their group, or their families, or even themselves. They consistently do things that benefit their genes, because they are all inevitably descended from those that did the same. None of your ancestors died celibate.... always, without exception, living things are designed to do things that enhance the chances of their genes or copies of their genes surviving and replicating."

-Matt Ridley, "The Origins of Virtue"

"In her book, The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson wrote that the 'place of the meeting of land and water...keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and the relentless drive of life. Each time I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings.'"

-Suzanne Golas, "A Spiritual Connection," Blue Planet Quarterly, vol. 4, issue 2

"The lack of popular interest in the natural history sciences, failing some other cultivated interest, is unfortunate both for the individual and for the community....The natural surroundings of Californians are singularly rich and varied. A scientific interest in at least certain features of our natural environment, as for example the trees, shrubs or herbaceous plants, directs one to useful and agreeable intellectual activity. Accurate and detailed knowledge of even a small area lifts the possessor out of the commonplace and enables him directly or indirectly to contribute to the wellbeing and happiness of his community."

-Willis Jepson, Trees of California, 1923

"Insect species are so prolific, says the National Academy report, that two and a half acres may contain over 42,000 different species. Each tree may be home to over 1,700 insect species. A single square meter of leaf will often house 50 species of ants alone. Researchers have found three species of beetles, six species of mites, and three species of moth living in the fur of a single sloth."

-Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

"But what pleasure it is to know that there is back county for them to retreat to, that nobody is going to push roads through that wilderness, that no RVs or trail bikes or tote goats will roar through those forests and stink up that clean air. The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls' good, but leave no tracks."

-Wallace Stegner, Crossing Into Eden, 1989

"When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast."

-John Burroughs

Jan. 23

"Gold, n.: A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done anything to them."

-Mike Harding

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

-Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the Alien & Sedition Act

"Man is nothing . . . unless he adventures. Either into the unknown of the world, of his environment. Or into the unknown of himself."

-D.H. Lawrence

"Ants in particular are arguably the most aggressive and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized nastiness; our species is by comparison gentle and sweet-tempered. The foreign policy of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week."

-Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants

"Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport. Sport is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor. Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are... given 12-gauge shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway) in the woods if that happened."

-R. Lerner, letter, Sierra, March-April 1991

"Real advances in understanding a subject like bird migration almost always come as partial or complete surprises...If scientific progress were predictable, it would become a sort of engineering, useful perhaps, but not much fun."

-Donald R. Griffin, Bird Migration, 1964

“Our senses are attuned, through evolution, to take notice of the shadows in the water, the sound of hooves in the distance, the honking of geese…We have survived as a species through the paying of attention, through this recognition of patterns in the world around us.”

-Jules Evens, “Return of the Coho,” Oct.-Dec. 2001 Bay Nature magazine

Jan. 30

"It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part."

-Wallace Stegner

"Mankind will not remain on Earth forever, but in its quest for light and space will at first timidly penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and later will conquer for itself all the space near the Sun."

-Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky

"Near by is the graceful loop of an old dry creek bed. The new creek bed is ditched straight as a ruler; it has been 'uncurled' by the county engineer to hurry the run-off. On the hill in the background are contoured strip-crops; they have been 'curled' by the erosion engineer to retard the run-off. The water must be confused by so much advice."

-Aldo Leopold, Sketches Here and There

"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

-R. Buckminster Fuller

"On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but has not quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks, this place conforms to none of the cliches about California with which they advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years."

-Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"

Two birds fly past.
They are needed somewhere.

-Robert Bly

"Today's children, growing up on lawns and pavements, will not even have nostalgia to guide them, and soon the animals will not only be missing, but forgotten."

-Sara Stein, Noah's Garden

"Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained than that of the bees?"

-Montaignes Essays (1580-88)

"Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, dirty thing on the face of the earth and you should save it for someone you love."

-Butch Hancock

"One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day."

-Aristotle (384-322 BC)

"This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall on the same day. As Air America Radio pointed out, 'It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a groundhog.'"

-Air America Radio

"Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker."

-Richard Dawkins, Honourary President, Darwin Day

"We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do... It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it."

-Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization

"Love is the answer; but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions."

-Woody Allen

"He is an optician, daily having to do with the microscope, telescope, and other inventions for sharpening our natural sight, thus enabling us mortals (as I once heard an eccentric put it) liberally to enlarge the field of our original and essential ignorance."

-Herman Melville (1819­1891)

"[W]e seem ultimately always thrown back on individual ethics as the basis of conservation policy. It is hard to make a man, by pressure of law or money, do a thing which does not spring naturally from his own personal sense of right and wrong."

-Aldo Leopold, March 1937

"The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond our reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the only home we shall ever know; the only paradise we ever need-if we only had the eyes to see."

-Edward Abbey

“San Bruno mountain itself is a near miracle in latter-day California, a relatively isolated coastal landscape of native bunchgrasses, shrubs, and flowers…It's primeval form rises just south of San Francisco like the hulking grizzly bears that used to roam the state.”

-Susan Zakin, “Biodiversity at Our Doorstep,” April-June 2002 Bay Nature

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong."

-Robert Louis Stevenson

"Support your right to arm bears."

-Cleveland Amory

"These bears, being so hard to die, rather intimidate us all."

-Captain Meriwhether Lewis, 1805

"Field guides are instruments of the pleasure of pure knowledge."

-Von Baeyer

"I can think of no sincere, decent human being, male or female, young or old, saintly or sinful, who can resist the bicycle."

-William Saroyan

"Volunteers are the backbone, heart, and soul of the restoration movement. And whatever the eventual results of their labors may be, working to revive damaged ecosystems is transforming and strengthening their relationship with the rest of nature."

-William K. Stevens, Miracle Under the Oaks

"Scotch, because one doesn't solve the world's problems over white wine."

-anon.

"An environmental setting developed over millions of years must be considered to have some merit. Anything so complicated as a planet, inhabited by more than a million and a half species of plants and animals, all of them living together in a more or less balanced equilibrium in which they continually live and reuse the same molecules of the soil and air, cannot be improved by aimless and uninformed tinkering."

-E. F. Schumacher

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

-Emerson

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes."

-Oscar Wilde

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

-Wallace Stegner

"The invasion of noxious weeds has created a level of destruction to America's environment and economy that is matched only by the damage caused by floods, earthquakes, wildfire, hurricanes, and mudslides."

-Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of the Interior

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."

-Martin Luther

March 4

"At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment—everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing."

-Wendell Berry

"Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'."

-Michael McClary

"The global environmental crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future….For civilization as a whole, the faith that is so essential to restore the balance now missing in our relationship with the earth is the faith that we do have a future. We can believe in that future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in the balance."

-Al Gore

March 7

"[I]f in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be "development" to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for. The sixth house would not be development at all, but rather it would be mere short-sighted stupidity. "Development" is like Shakespeare's virtue, "which grown into a pleurisy, dies of its own too-much." In objection to the dedication of the Gila as a permanent wilderness hunting ground, it has been truly said that a part of the area which would be "locked up" bears valuable stands of timber. I admit that this is true.
Likewise, might our sixth lot be a corner lot, and hence very valuable for a grocery store or a filling station. I still insist it is the last lot for a needed playground, and this being the case, I am not interested in grocery stores or filling stations, of which we have a fair to middling supply elsewhere.

-Aldo Leopold, "A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Gounds," Outdoor Life, November 1925

"One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret."

-Barry Lopez

"In my first interview with a Sierra bear we were frightened and embarrassed, both of us, but the bear's behavior was better than mine….After studying his appearance as he stood at rest, I rushed toward him to frighten him, that I might study his gait in running. But, contrary to all I had heard about the shyness of bears, he did not run at all; and when I stopped short within a few steps of him, as he held his ground in a fighting attitude, my mistake was monstrously plain. I was then put on my good behavior, and never afterward forgot the right manners of the wilderness."

-John Muir (1838-1914)

"I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and dither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke and there I lay myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

-Chuang-tsu

"After you have exhausted that there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night."

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

"I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back."

-Fred Allen

"The earth is a garden and each of us only need care for our own part for life to be breathed back into the planet, into the soil, into ourselves."

-John Jeavons

"This is a one line proof... if we start sufficiently far to the left."

-Cambridge University Math Department

"Naturalists are opportunists. They love not merely the subject but the whole idea of the subject. Their primary aim is to learn as much as possible about all aspects of the species that give them esthetic pleasure. Organisms are their totems, to be venerated and put to the service of science. Both of us belong to this second school of biology. We are professional naturalists, and a large part of our careers has been devoted to bringing ants into the mainstream of biology."

-Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants

"How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence."

-Benjamin Disraeli

"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."

-Sigmund Freud (about the Irish)

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

-Greek Proverb

"This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time."

-John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

"There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

-Rachel Carson

On the ragged edge of the world
I'll roam.
And the home of the wolf
Will be my home.

-Robert N. Service

I discovered the secret of the sea
in meditation upon a dewdrop.

-Kahlil Gibran

"You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

-Wallace Stegner, Thoughts in a Dry Land, 1972

"When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive."

-Carl Sagan, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors"

"Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future."

-Wallace Stegner

"A sense of history should be the most precious gift of science and of the arts."

-Aldo Leopold

“...the endless wonder and excitement of nature's flair for individuality rather than conformity.”

-Justice William O. Douglas

"Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want . . . but they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy . . . try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science."

-Carl Sagan, "The Demon Haunted World"

"Still another misconception about the future is that it will be the same for all of us. While some warn that we are headed for disaster, the fact is that millions of people, perhaps half a billion or more, live disastrously impoverished lives today. Developed nations forget that most of the human race is often uncomfortable, usually hungry."

-Jacques Yves Cousteau

"The battle for conservation cannot be limited to the winning of new conquests. Like liberty itself, conservation must be fought for unceasingly to protect earlier victories.  There are always plenty of hogs who are trying to get natural resources for their own personal benefit! Public lands and parks, our forests and our mineral reserves, are subject to many destructive influences. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people for the benefit of a few."

-President Harry S. Truman, December 1948 Inauguration of Everglades National Park

"I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later."

-Mitch Hedberg

“It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.”

-Edward Abbey, 1972

April is here
Blithest season of the year;
The little brook laughs as it leaps away;
The lambs are out on the hills at play.

-Eben E. Rexford

"If we do not begin to preserve them (native wildflowers), the time will come when they will become extinct and live only in history."

-Theodore Payne, 1916

April 4

"But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all."

-Oscar Wilde

"Garden with Mother Nature, not against her."

-Andy Wasowski, The Landscaping Revolution

"Wild places, in the ordinary sense of that phrase, are in precious short supply on planet Earth at the end of the twentieth century….[N]owadays you might step out of a dugout canoe at the Amazon headwaters and meet an Indian man wearing a red feather through his nose and a gimmee cap reading OKLAHOMA SOONERS."

-David Quammen

April 7

"The crisis we now face calls for passion ….Why shouldn't I be angry, emotional, passionate? Madmen and madwomen are wrecking this beautiful, blue-green, living Earth. Friends who hold nothing of value but a greasy dollar bill are tearing down pillars of evolution a-building for nearly four thousand years….We must break out of society's freeze on our passions. We must feel the tug of the moon, hear goose music overhead. We must love Earth and rage against her destroyers."

-Dave Foreman

"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."

-Mark Twain

"I think the Union army had something to do with it."

-General George Pickett, years afterward on why his charge at Gettysburg failed

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."

-Albert Camus

"Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person shared a little of what he is good at doing."

-Quincy Jones

"A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad."

-Bob Edwards

"Real advances in understanding a subject like bird migration almost always come as partial or complete surprises...If scientific progress were predictable, it would become a sort of engineering, useful perhaps, but not much fun."

-Donald R. Griffin, Bird Migration, 1964

"The Great Central Plain of California, during the months of March, April, and May, was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castillejas, and innumerable compositae were so crowded together that, had ninety-nine percent of them been taken away, the plain would still have seemed to any but Californians extravagantly flowery. The radiant, honeyful corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky‹one sheet of purple and gold, with the bright Sacramento pouring through the midst of it from the north, the San Joaquin from the south, and their many tributaries sweeping in at right angles from the mountains, dividing the plain into sections fringed with trees."

-John Muir

"In my drawings of birds only did I interest [the tutor] Mr. Da Costa. He always commended my efforts, nay he even went farther, for one morning, while I was drawing a figure of the Ardea Herodias, he assured me the time might come when I should be a great American naturalist. However curious it may seem to the scientific world that these sayings from the lips of such a man should affect me, I assure you they had great weight with me…."

-John James Audubon (1785-1851)

Everything that lives,
Lives not alone, nor for itself.

-William Blake

"Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men."

-Franklin Roosevelt, at the FDR Memorial

"The care of the refugees from the recent San Francisco fire, first for each other, then for their pets, was a noticeable feature. Dogs, cats, canary birds, parrots and monkeys were all most carefully cherished and protected while more material treasure was lost sight of."

-Sunset Magazine Editor, May 1906

Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Someday after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire."

-Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881-1955)

"I tried again, I failed better."

-Lao Tse

"Earth Day is the first completely international and universal holiday that the world has ever known. Every other holiday was tied to one place, or some political or special event. This Day is tied to Earth itself, and to the place of Earth in the whole solar system."

-Margaret Mead, 1977

"The pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing."

-George Orwell

"The clock indicates the moment... but what does eternity indicate?"

-Whitman

"When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it."

-Anatole France

"Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in a lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much."

-Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991

"After a time, habituated to spending so many hours a day on my bike, I became less and less interested in my friends. I could rely on it, which is more than I could say about my buddies."

-Henry Miller, "My Bike and Other Friends"

"Stars are not seen by sunshine."

-Spanish proverb

"Extinction of a single plant species may result in the disappearance of up to 30 other species of plants and wildlife."

-U.S. Forest Service

When that Aprille with his shoures sote               
The Droughte of March hath perced to the rote, 
And bathed every vein in swich licour                  
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;                 
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.             

When April, with its sweet showers,
has pierced the drought of March to the root,
and bathed every vein in such (sweet) liquor,
of which virtue the flower is engendered;
then folk begin to long to go on pilgrimages.

-Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

"I hate quotations."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one."

-Mother Teresa

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

-George Orwell

"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgements using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat?
In essence, should we know better?"

-Peter Cheeke, PhD., Oregon State University Professor of Animal Agriculture

“If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around.”

-Christina Stead

“Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”

-R. Buckminster Fuller

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."

-James Bovard

"When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist."

-Barbara Ehrenreich

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

-Albert Einstein

Black bees on the clover-heads drowsily clinging,
Where tall feathered grasses and buttercups sway;
And all through the fields a white sprinkle of daisies,
Open-eyed at the setting of day.

-Abba Woolson

"The problem with endangered species is: You clear up one and another one comes along."

-Manual Lujan, former Secretary of the Interior

"He who would make serious use of his life must always act as though he had a long time to live and must schedule his time as though he were about to die."

-Émile Littré

"Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another."

-Homer

"My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping."

-Rita Rudner

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

-Pablo Picasso

"We democrats are deeply flawed people, we can be earnestly boring and awfully righteous about moral issues in faraway places. We can be weenies, capable of doing dumb things in the name of the common good. But we do stick to our guns. We believe in decency and public spiritedness and have refused to hitch our wagon to yahooism and have supported government as a necessary force for good. And we are passionate. This is a year for passion."

-Garrison Keillor

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

-George Orwell

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

-Albert Einstein

"This looking business is risky. Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great Autumn hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own. I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them."

-Annie Dillard

"To put the matter as simply as possible we, having entered our bug period as children, were blessed by never being required to abandon it."

-Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants

"Outer space is no place for a person of breeding."

-Lady Violet Bonham Carter

"Quantity of beauty required to launch a single ship: 1 Millihelen."

-Schott's Original Miscellany

"If we are saying that the loss of species is inherently bad-I don't think we know enough about how the world works to say that."

-Craig Manson, assistant secretary at the Interior Department who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. (in Sierra, March-April 2004)

"There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter."

-Franklin P. Adams

"And then to the rarest treasure, Golden Gate Park on a car-free Sunday morning, the air wet and clean, the meadows green with the promise of spring. Not a single automobile: The silence is deafening, you can actually hear the branches dripping moisture, squirrels scrambling through the underbrush -- and the birds! Hundreds of redbreasted robins bobbing across the lawns, now that there are no cars to frighten them. On Stanyan, the families are renting bikes and heading into the winding trails. Slowly it dawns on them that they can use the main drive and the roads. For once the world does not belong to the automobile. The bicycle is king again and the rider may go where fancy dictates without looking nervously over his shoulder. You are even allowed, for a few unrealistic minutes, to reflect on how pleasant life would be if the car were banned from San Francisco."

-Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/28/73

"Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization."

-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

"It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously."

-Peter Ustinov

"Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day."

-Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb

"Twenty percent more water than is now available will be needed to feed the additional three billion people who will be alive by 2025."

-World Commission on Water for the 21st Century

"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language."

-Martin Buber

We need the sea.
We need a place to stand and watch and listen--
to feel the pulse-beat of the world
as the surf rolls in.

-David Brower

"One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret."

-Barry Lopez

I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces
I sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains
I sing my song to the free.

-Pete Townshend "Song is Over"

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

-Aldo Leopold

“Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.”

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

In June 'tis good to lie beneath a tree
While the blithe season comforts every sense,
Steeps all the brain in rest, and heals the heart,
Brimming it o'er with sweetness unawares.

-J. R. Lowell

“...when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental; men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost....All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre; the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum....The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

-H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 1920

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught."

-Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist

"Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee."

-F. Lee Bailey

"At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years."

-Arthur C. Clarke

"The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."

-Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, scientists who in 1959 proposed a system of radiotelescopes to search for extraterrestrial life, a proposal that culminated in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)

"[We] must change our attitudes toward the ocean. We must regard it as no longer a mystery, a menace, something so vast and invulnerable that we need not concern ourselves with it….Instead we want to explore the themes of the ocean's existence—how it moves and breathes, how it experiences dramas and seasons, how it nourishes its hosts of living things, how it harmonizes the physical and biological rhythms of the whole earth, what hurts it and what feeds it—not least of all, what are its stories."

-Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997)

“The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.”

-Martin Mull

I've watched you now a full half hour
Self poised upon that yellow flower.
And little butterfly! Indeed,
I know not if you sleep or feed.
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Has found you out among the trees.

-William Wordsworth

"Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language."

-Jean Rostand

"I take the Biblical idea. God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees God says, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

-Ann Coulter

Then what is the answer?--Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
  the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
   and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
   not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
   the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars
   and his history....for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
   the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
   or drown in despair when his days darken.

-Robinson Jeffers

"I did not want a simple, straightforward zoo, with the ordinary run of animals: the idea behind my zoo was to aid in the preservation of animal life….[S]cattered about, all over the world, are a host of fascinating small mammals, birds, and reptiles, and scant attention is being paid to their preservation, as they are neither edible nor wearable, and of little interest to the tourist who demands lions and rhinos."

-Gerald Durrell (1925-1995)

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."

-Audobon

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone's throw of the shore (Terra Del Fuego), over which the beech tree extended its branches."

-Darwin's Voyage of a Naturalist

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

-Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

"The bottom line rests on the earth."

-David Brower

"I should like to enjoy this summer flower by flower."

-Andre Gide

"...what one man can imagine, other men can do...."

-Jules Verne (1829-1905)

“I get sick of listening to straight people complain about, "Well, hey, we don't have a heterosexual-pride day, why do you need a gay-pride day?" I remember when I was a kid I'd always ask my mom: "Why don't we have a Kid's Day? We have a Mother's Day and a Father's Day, but why don't we have a Kid's Day?" My mom would always say, "Every day is Kid's Day." To all those heterosexuals that bitch about gay pride, I say the same thing: Every day is heterosexual-pride day! Can't you people enjoy your banquet and not piss on those of us enjoying our crumbs over here in the corner?”

-Rob Nash

"Fifteen hundred years is ample time in which to lose mutual comprehension. Iceland was colonized by the Norwegians at the end of the ninth century AD. Today's Icelanders, with considerable effort, can understand people from the Scandinavian peninsula, but the Scandinavians hardly understand the Icelanders. A thousand years is the minimum time span for a language to change so much that it becomes incomprehensible."

-Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, "The Great Human Diasporas"

Resist much
Obey little

-Whitman

"In the long run protection must come by the devices and resources of united effort, high intelligence, and careful handling. We must work for it, plan for it, strive for it. It is a noble object. If the beauty and glamour of the Golden Land in its youth can be preserved and harmonized with the practical phases of our civilization, then we may proudly say that our race was fit to enjoy it and to keep it, rising to the spirit and glad wonder of Nature in the valleys, mountains and canyons of our California."

-Willis Linn Jepson, 1917

“The best way out of a difficulty is through it.”

-anon.

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

-Iris Murdoch

"He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly."

-Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

"Those who are really awake to the sights and sounds which the procession of the months offers them, find endless entertainment and instruction. Yet there are great multitudes who are present at as many as threescore and ten performances, without ever really looking at the scenery, or listening to the music, or observing the chief actors."

-O.W. Holmes

"The idea that the GNP is not the measure of all things is shocking to most Americans. A nation that is used to having its landscapes partially obscured by billboards and its most serious news programs interrupted by jingles on behalf of some ridiculous luxury is perhaps beyond saving."

-Howard Ensign Evans, Life on a Little Known Planet, 1968

"Take away wilderness and you take away the opportunity to be American."

-Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

-Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Jack London's "The Iron Heel"

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."

-Plato (427-347 B.C.)

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”

-John Muir

Across the lonely beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I;
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood, bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I.

-Celia Thaxter

"Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water."

-W.C. Fields

That sea beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.

-John Milton, Paradise Lost

"When the bee comes to your house, let her have beer; you may want to visit the bee's house some day."

-Proverb from the Congo

"The conservationist's most important task, if we are to save the earth, is to educate.”

-Peter Scott

"Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."

-Victor Hugo, French poet, novelist and dramatist

“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”

-Steven Wright

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime, you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books-

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

-Jane Hirshfield, "Tree", from Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001

"When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half."

-Gracie Allen

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity."

-Harlan Ellison

"There is the life of the plankton in almost endless variety; there are the many kinds of fish, both surface and bottom living; there are the hosts of different invertebrate creatures on the sea-floor; and there are those almost grotesque forms of pelagic life in the oceans depths. Then there are the squids and cuttlefish, and the porpoises, dolphins and great whales."

-Sir Alister Hardy, "The Open Sea" 1956

“It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.”

-George Burns

“Cockroaches thrive in British Columbia , as they do almost everywhere. The common species seems to be the German roach....They are in everything, even the food. On this trip I had them served to me in three different styles, alive in strawberries, a la carte with fried fish, and baked in a biscuit.”

-A. N. Caudell in the journal Entomological News, 1903

“I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees.”

-Heinrich Heine

"If the world is cold make it your business to light fires"

-Horace Traubel

"All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred million of worlds around a million of suns, the activity of light, the life of animals; all are grand and perpetual miracles."

-Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet)

"If civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, let it be first of all to carry a message of respect-respect for all life."

-Jacques-Yves Cousteau

"In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia."

-Charles A Lindbergh, declaring that if he were a young man he would choose a career that kept him more in contact with nature than with science.

"Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

-Dr. Suess

"The Bay Area is incalculably fortunate to have a unique oasis of biodiversity at San Bruno Mountain. However, as is the case with so many other global treasures, this great fortune is not being handled with adequate care. In my book, The Diversity of Life, I highlighted San Bruno Mountain as one of eighteen global biodiversity "hotspots" in need of immediate protection, along with the Usambara mountain forests of Tanzania, the Colombian Choco, Madagascar, and associated problems, principally the invasion of non-native species. More development, as is currently proposed, will further fragment what is home to hundreds of plant and animal species, including several that live nowhere else. Current Habitat Conservation Plan provisions are insufficient to preserve this rich biodiversity. It is imperative that all the open space that remains on San Bruno Mountain be saved. We can leave our descendants a sorely degraded environment and an example of abuse and exploitation, or we can leave a rich legacy of respectful stewardship--it is our choice. I urge all Californians to take a stand in favor of conserving San Bruno Mountain."

Sincerely yours,
Edward O. Wilson
University Research Professor, Harvard University

-San Francisco Chronicle Op­Ed; January 6, 1999

"Garden with Mother Nature, not against her."

-Andy Wasowski, The Landscaping Revolution

"All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred million of worlds around a million of suns, the activity of light, the life of animals; all are grand and perpetual miracles."

-Voltaire

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."

-Martin Luther

“Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language.”

-Jean Rostand

"The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught."

-Marquis de Vauvenargues

"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons."

-R. Buckminster Fuller

"A few years ago a gentleman came up to me when I was mounting wasps at a picnic table in a Missouri state park. 'What is the purpose of a wasp?' he asked. Had I been a lepidopterist, he doubtless would have asked the purpose of a butterfly, though I'm not sure what he would have asked had I been an anthropologist."

-Howard Ensign Evans

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Every thing that lives is holy."

-William Blake

You sea! I resign myself to you also... I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me...

-Whitman

"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."

-Abraham Lincoln

"Many would be cowards if they had courage enough."

-Thomas Fuller

"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish."

-Steven Wright

"Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

-Dr. Suess

“The place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest and see the least.”

-H. L. Mencken, on Texas

"The study of Nature is intercourse with the highest mind."

-Agassiz

"Lawyers as a group are no more dedicated to justice than a private utility is dedicated to giving light."

-David Melinkoff

Such stillness...
The cries of the cicadas
Sink into the rocks.

-Matsuo Basho (1644­1694)

"Thirty-five years ago there was little trade on Kan Kun island, in the remotest corner of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. It was a series of pristine white sandbars in a calm blue sea. Only three fishermen lived there, and only for part of the year. But in the early 1970s it was discovered by international bankers, who thought they had found financial paradise, and the world's first purpose-built giant holiday resort was born. The ancient Mayan name Kan Kun - "nest of vipers" - was softened to tourist-friendly Cancun."

-by John Vidal, Guardian Weekly of 11-17 Sept 2003

"No man has ever seen the sun, or ever will. What we call ‘sunlight' is only a narrow span of the entire solar spectrum ­the immensely broad band of vibrations which the Sun ...pours into space."

-Arthur C. Clarke, By Space Possessed, 1993

"The clock indicates the moment... but what does eternity indicate?"

-Whitman

"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just...."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."

-Bill Vaughan

"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."

-Thomas A. Edison

"What's another word for Thesaurus?"

-Steven Wright

"Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?"

-George Wallace

"Music is essentially useless, as life is."

-George Santayana

His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee's experience
Of clovers and of noon!

-Emily Dickinson

"There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science."

-Louis Pasteur

Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?

A: Pumpkin pi.

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Study without thinking is worthless; thinking without study is dangerous."

-Confucius

"Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else."

-Samuel Johnson

"Gentleman...look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are godless and foolish, and we don't understand that life is a paradise, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep."

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."

-Albert Einstein

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

-Lao-Tse

"Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes."

-Ramani Maharshi

The shore is an ancient world,
for as long as there has been an earth
and sea there has been this place
of the meeting of land and water.

-Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

"I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least..."

-Whitman

"The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive."

-Robert Heinlein

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."

-Audubon

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

-William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree (l. 1­4)

"For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

-Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

"I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures."

-Christian Barnard, surgeon

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Oh how I wish he'd go away.

-Hughes Mearns

We shall never cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time.

-T.S. Eliot

"Cultural historian Elias Canetti once remarked that each of us is a king on a field of corpses. If we were to stop for a moment and reflect on the number of creatures and earth's resources, and the materials we have expropriated and consumed in our lifetime, we would be appalled at the carnage and depletion that has been required to secure our existence."

-Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

-Oscar Wilde

"The higher the buildings, the lower the morals."

-Noel Coward

"Incidentally, entomologists are always delighted to find people who can spell the name of their profession properly. I have always especially resented being called an antomologist, when I specialize in wasps, not ants. Antimologist is even worse, since it implies I am against ­ologies, which I usually am not. An etamologist, I suppose, is one who has just eaten a scientist."

-Howard Ensign Evans

"We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features- the seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thundercloud.... We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander."

-Henry Thoreau

"Mustard's no good without roast beef."

-Chico Marx

"In democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes."

-Mogens Jallberg

"The best measure of a just society is whether you'd be willing to be thrown into it at random."

-John Komlos

"As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be that which experiences."

-Blake

"I do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many."

-Theodore Roosevelt

"There can't be good living where there is not good drinking."

-Benjamin Franklin

If you want to live and thrive,
let the spider run alive.

-American Quaker saying

Work—for some good, be it ever so slowly;
Cherish some flower, be it ever so lowly…

-Frances Sargent Osgood, Laborare est Orare

“Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”

-James Madison

"It gets harder every year for me to drive south from San Francisco along El Camino Real, along the Bayshore Freeway, or even along Highway 280. The memory of open shoreline, of acres of waving grasses, of marshland from which birds arose by the thousands like a cannon shot, of fruit trees in bloom, of one lone tannery, of a big red barn in a vast field--all now replaced by slurbs or miles of industrial slum--is painful to me. The loss eats at my soul. The quality of life here has become so diminished by population pressures, it sometimes seems almost unbearable."

-Margo Patterson Doss, A Walker's Yearbook

"In one of my latest conversations with Darwin, he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive."

-Alfred Russell Wallace, 1872

"Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe."

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart."

-Douglas Adams

"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."

-Samuel Butler

"Virtue is its own punishment."

-Aneurin Bevan

"Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most."

-Joseph Wood Krutch

"According to the California Oak Foundation, 331 wildlife species -birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles- use oak woodlands for food, cover, and reproduction. Over 5,000 species of insects, including 7 butterfly species, are also part of this extensive web of life."

-Nancy Bauer, The Habitat Garden Book

"You won't have an economy on a dead planet."

-David Brower

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

-Ernest Rutherford

"The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic."

-Henry Ward Beecher

"It is much easier to show compassion to animals. They are never wicked."

-Haile Selassie

"But if there is a more worthy aim for us than to be drudges--if there are other uses in the things around us than their power to bring money--if there are higher faculties to be exercised than acquisitive and sensual ones--if the pleasures which poetry and art and science and philosophy can bring are of any moment--then it is desirable that the instinctive inclination which every child shows to observe natural beauties and investigate natural phenomena should be encouraged."

-Herbert Spencer, Education

"The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible."

-George Burns

"Beekeeping is a business that requires the greatest amount of attention to details.... The good beekeeper is generally more or less cranky."

-C. P. Dadant

"Real advances in understanding a subject like bird migration almost always come as partial or complete surprises...If scientific progress were predictable, it would become a sort of engineering, useful perhaps, but not much fun."

-Donald R. Griffin, Bird Migration, 1964

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life."

-Bertrand Russell, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish"

"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."

-James M. Barrie

"In time, and with water, everything changes."

-Leonardo da Vinci

"All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance."

-Edward Gibbon

"The fundamental dilemma is balancing the needs of our natural systems and lands with the impulse to convert that bounty for short-term economic gain."

-Bob Walker

"If you ever crawl inside an old hollow log and go to sleep, and while you're in there some guys come and seal up both ends and then put it on a truck and take it to another city, boy, I don't know what to tell you."

-Jack Handey

"My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists."

-Jean Rostand

A little beetle passed me by.
He didn't make much fuss,
He ran around my garden
Like a tiny yellow bus.

-Slyvia Gerditz

"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."

-Aldo Leopold, 1948

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
   Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
    Should waste them all.
 The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
  O hushed October morning mild,
  Begin the hours of this day slow.
 Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
  Beguile us in the way you know.
   Release one leaf at break of day;
      At noon release another leaf;
  One from our trees, one far away.

- Robert Frost, October

"What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."

-John Ruskin

"The only thing that smells worse than an oil refinery is a feedlot. Texas has a lot of both."

-Molly Ivins

"Not every (environmental) problem of consequence comes with a Bhopal-style wake-up call. Global warming and species extinction are examples of potential catastrophes that are hiding in plain sight...."

-New York Times 20 August 2002

"The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God.  If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim any more ludicrous or offensive."

-Sam Harris

"Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine."

-David R. Brower

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

-Paul Dirac

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

-H. P. Lovecraft

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.

-T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

"Part of the reason that children are afraid of the dark may be that, in our entire evolutionary history up until just a moment ago, they never slept alone. Instead, they nestled safely, protected by an adult, usually Mum. In the enlightened West we stick them alone in a dark room, say goodnight, and have difficulty understanding why they're sometimes upset. It makes good evolutionary sense for children to have fantasies of scary monsters. In a world stalked by lions & hyenas, such fantasies help prevent defenceless toddlers from wandering too far from their guardians. How can this safety mechanism be effective for a vigorous, curious young animal unless it delivers industrial strength terror? Those who are not afraid of monsters tend not to leave descendants. Eventually, I imagine, over the course of human evolution, almost all children become afraid of monsters."

-Carl Sagan, "The Demon Haunted World"

"Parks are made to bring the music to the many, but by the time many are attuned to hear it there is little left but noise."

-Aldo Leopold, Sketches Here and There

"There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I  did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we  feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

-Willa Cather, My Antonia

"The only thing I like about rich people is their money."

-Nancy Astor

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

-Greek Proverb

"The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned. For no two successive days is the shore precisely the same."

-Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

Many miles away there's a shadow on the door of a cottage on the
Shore of a dark Scottish lake.

-Walter Scott

“When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“David Suzuki's voice, quiet and compelling, is one of the most crucial sounds on a noisy planet.”

-David Quammen

When the ripe pear droops heavily,
The yellow wasp hums loud and long
His hot and drowsy autumn song.
A yellow flame he seems to be,
When darting suddenly from high
He lights where fallen peaches lie.

Yellow and black-this tiny thing's
A tiger-soul on elfin wings.

-Fiona McLeod (under the pseudonym William Sharp), 1857-1908

"Man must go back to nature for information."

-Thomas Paine

"Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness."

-Robertson Davies

"There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens."

-Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (1967) introduction

Her lawn
looks like a meadow,
And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne's Lace.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be? ­it is the same the angels breathe."

-Mark Twain, Roughing It

"Let us remember that, as much has been given us, much will be expected from us, and that true homage comes from the heart as well as from the lips, and shows itself in deeds."

-Theodore Roosevelt

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the spider to the fly;
“‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy.”

-Mary Howitt (1799-1888)

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars."

-Walt Whitman

"We need a president who's fluent in at least one language."

-Buck Henry

"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."

"How much deeper would oceans be if sponges didn't live there?"

-anon.

"A farmer and his son are out in the yard, pulling a crosscut saw through the innards of an ancient cottonwood. The tree is so large and so old that only a foot of blade is left to pull on. Time was when that tree was a buoy in the prairie sea. George Rogers Clark may have camped under it; buffalo may have nooned in its shade, switching flies. Every spring it roosted fluttering pigeons. It is the best historical library short of the State College, but once a year it sheds cotton on the farmer's window screens. Of these two facts, only the second is important."

-Aldo Leopold, Sketches Here and There

"The care of the refugees from the recent San Francisco fire, first for each other, then for their pets, was a noticeable feature. Dogs, cats, canary birds, parrots and monkeys were all most carefully cherished and protected while more material treasure was lost sight of."

-Sunset Magazine Editor, May 1906

Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless,
Christmas dinner's dark and blue,
When you stop and try to see it
From the turkey's point of view.

Sunday dinner isn't funny
Easter feasts are just bad luck,
When you see it from the viewpoint
Of the chicken or the duck.

Oh, how I once loved tuna salad,
Pork and lobsters, lamb chops, too,
Till I stopped and looked at dinner
From the dinner's point of view.

-Shel Silverstein, "Point of View"

"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

-William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

"I look on Man as but a fungus."

-Thoreau

"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."

-Soren Kierkegaard

"Wonder... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature."

-Adam Smith, "The History of Astronomy" (1795)

"We think in generalities, but we live in detail."

-Alfred North Whitehead

"Evolutionary biology is now uttering and seeking those forces that link us with all those that have being. If we can discover the meaning in the trilling of a frog, perhaps we may understand why it is for us not merely noise but a song of poetry and emotion."

-Adrian Forsyth

"My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?"

-Charles M. Schulz

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

-Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

"On the subject of wild mushrooms, it is easy to tell who is an expert and who is not: the expert is the one who is still alive."

-Donald Henahan

"In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying."

-Bertrand Russell

"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."

-Albert Einstein

"The world is in the midst of a mass extinction unlike any since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Extinction rates are currently estimated anywhere between 100 to 1,000 times greater than normal."

-National Wildlife Federation

"Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends."

-Joseph Campbell

"Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."

-John Muir

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

-Anne Frank

"One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child."

-Randall Jarrell

"'Whom are you?' he asked, for he had attended business college."

-George Ade

"It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it."

-Edward Abbey

"There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. What is there to life, if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pond at night?"

-Chief Seattle

"My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions but in the fewness of my wants."

-J. Brotherton

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."

-Samuel Johnson

"The joyful, songful streams of the Sierra are among the most famous and interesting in the world....outspread over all the range like embroidery, their silvery branches interlacing on a thousand mountains, singing their way home to the sea."

-John Muir

"The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it."

-Carl Becker

"The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life."

-Ernest Renan (1823-92), French philosopher and theologian

"I think I could turn and live with animals. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God."

-Walt Whitman

"There are no uninteresting things; there are only uninterested people."

-G. K. Chesterton

"The true purpose of astronomy is not to add to the vulgar comforts of life, but to raise the mind to the contemplation of things which can be perceived by pure intellect alone."

-Plato (ca. 428-327 BC), Republic

Step out onto the Planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.
Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
Nobody's ever really seen.
How many can you find?

-Lew Welch, “Step out onto the Planet”

At Christmas play and make good cheere,
For Christmas comes but once a yeere.

-Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry: The Farmers Daily Diet, St. 6

"And God created great whales."

-Genesis

"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal."

"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent."

-Isaac Newton

"If you can't see the top of the mountain, it's raining. If you can, it means it's about to rain."

-Irish weather forecast

"Nothing exists nor happens in the visible sky that is not sensed in some hidden manner by the faculties of Earth and Nature:  (so that) these faculties of the spirit here on earth are as much affected as the sky itself."

-Johannes Kepler, De Stella Nova, 1609

"The Equal Rights Amendment is part of a feminist agenda that is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."

-Reverend Pat Robertson

"One who is willing to give one's body for the Earth, and do so with love, is the only one fit to be steward of the Earth"

-Lao Tzu

"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action."

-Frank Tibolt

"Thirty-five years ago there was little trade on Kan Kun island, in the remotest corner of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. It was a series of pristine white sandbars in a calm blue sea. Only three fishermen lived there, and only for part of the year.
"But in the early 1970s it was discovered by international bankers, who thought they had found financial paradise, and the world's first purpose-built giant holiday resort was born. The ancient Mayan name Kan Kun - 'nest of vipers' - was softened to tourist-friendly Cancun."

-by John Vidal, Guardian Weekly

"Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough."

-E.O. Wilson, Naturalist

"Most people have seen worse things in private than they pretend to be shocked at in public."

-Edgar Watson Howe

"Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites."

-William Ruckelshaus, first EPA Adminstrator

"Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both."

-John Andrew Holmes

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

-Jack Kerouac

"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

-Steven Wright

"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."

-BF Skinner

"Without speculation, there is no original observation."

-Charles Darwin, in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace

"It's not easy being green."

-Kermit the Frog

"When the bee comes to your house, let her have beer; you may want to visit the bee's house some day."

-Proverb from the Congo

"January got its name from the god Janus, who had two faces and looked in two directions. Sometimes the naturalist and environmentalist begins to wonder if Janus is the only one that is two-faced. All about us we encounter individuals, industries and governments that seem more like Janus than not. Yet are we so free of guilt that we can afford to cast the first stone? Stewardship begins at home and January is the time to take stock and see how we have fared throughout this past year. Did we care for the environment? Did we cast our vote wisely? Did we attend public meetings and speak out? Did we support the national, state and local organizations working for a better environment? Were we good stewards of the earth? Maybe, like Janus, we had better look back and if we don't like what we see then look ahead and vow to do better."

-John F. Gardner, the Naturalist's Almanac, 1971

"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument."

-William G. McAdoo

"The bottom line rests on the earth."

"live in beauty... see in beauty... go in beauty..."

-Black Elk

"I feel more comfortable with gorillas than people. I can anticipate what a gorilla's going to do, and they're purely motivated."

-Dian Fossey

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

-Benjamin Franklin

The baby bat
Screamed out in fright,
“Turn on the dark
I'm afraid of the light!”

-author unknown

"The study of entomology is one of the most fascinating of pursuits. It takes its votaries into the treasure-houses of Nature, and explains some of the wonderful series of links which form the great chain of creation. It lays open before us another world, of which we have been hitherto unconscious, and shows us that the tiniest insect, so small perhaps that the unaided eye can scarcely see it, has work to do in the world, and does it."

-Rev. J .G. Wood (quoted in The Moth Book, by W. J. Holland)

"And what is weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing."

-Stephen Pinker

"They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea."

-Sir Francis Bacon

"This was my first trip to southern Africa. Until then, as it has been for so many others, my knowledge of wildlife on this continent was based on working in East Africa. My own visits there had been enhanced by the interpretations of scores of scientists and artists who have documented that enchanted land. By contrast, southern Africa's natural heritage is less well known to people outside of Africa. After the grandeur of the savannas in Kenya and Tanzania, much of northern Botswana appears, to the uninitiated, like a featureless scrubland. There are no mountains like Kilimanjaro looming over the land or spectacles like the congregation of a million wildebeest on the open plains of Serengeti. But what Botswana has is wildness. It has often been compared, with some nostalgia, to the way East Africa was 30 years ago ­before the tremendous pressure of population growth, before the commercialization of the safari industry, before hunting as a way of life came to an end, before poaching became a major force. Botswana, many say, represents the last of Old Africa."

-Frans Lanting, Okavango: Africa's Last Eden, 1993

"When will they realize that there are too many drugs? No fewer than 150,000 preparations are now in use. About 15,000 new mixtures and dosages hit the market each year, while about 12,000 die off...We simply don't have enough diseases to go around. At the moment the most helpful contribution is the new drug to counteract the untoward effect of other new drugs."

-Dr. Walter Modell, Cornell University Medical College, from Time, May 26, 1961

"Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and the gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks."

-John Muir

"We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"

-Lee Iacocca

He prayeth well who loveth well,
Both men and bird and beast;
He prayeth best who loveth best,
All things both great and small:
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

-Coleridge

“President Bush conceded yesterday that even many of his friends have doubts about America's role in Iraq. ‘There's a lot of my friends who come and bass fish with me. They don't say it out loud. I know they're thinking it: Why?' Bush said.”

-from the News, cited in the New Yorker

"The environmental and human effects of the modern way of thinking and structuring of relationships has been near-catastrophic, weakening ecosystems, and undermining the stability and sustainability of human communities. The great challenge that lies ahead of us is to come to grips with the dark side of the modern worldview-to address the cold evil that comes of reducing all of nature and life to commercial resources that can be technologically mediated, manipulated, and reconstructed to suit the narrow objectives of utilitarianism and market efficiency."

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

-Gore Vidal

Spring lightens the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airie, last the bright consummate flower.

-John Milton, Paradise Lost

"Could we have a genetically based affinity for butterflies, which are the most salient demonstrations of metamorphosis present in the environments where humans have evolved? If genetically encoded, does the expression of this image require an environmental trigger? Could the archetype remain latent, within our subconscious mind, until some element in our immediate environment calls it forth?"

-Gary Paul Nabhan, Cultures of Habit

Come when the rains
Have glazed the snow, and clothed the trees with ice,
While the slant sun of February pours
Into the bowers a flood of light.

-William Cullen Bryant

"Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."

"Those who find beauty in all of nature will find themselves at one with the secrets of life itself."

-L. W. Gilbert

"The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open before him and he has only to turn its leaves."

"Let us, like beings of intelligence and vision, converse about life, nature and the future of the Earth."

-Jamie Delano, Batman: ManBat

"We dwell on a largely unexplored planet."

-E. O. Wilson

"There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there's light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space ... THEN there's a race -- between the trees on either side, who want to spread OUT, and the seedlings below, who race to grow UP."

"The ability to see beauty is the beginning of our moral sensibility. What we believe is beautiful we will not wantonly destroy."

"Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts; the sight of the deep-blue sky, and the clustering stars above, seem to impart a quiet to the mind."

"Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.
Let's do it, let's fall in love..."

-Cole Porter

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."

-Aldous Huxley

"Let us permit nature to have her way, she understands her business better than we do."

"And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

-Robert Frost

"It is good to love the unknown."

-Charles Lamb, Valentine's Day

Birds, butterflies, and flowers
All make one band of paramours.

-William Wordsworth, Green Linnet

"My problems start when the smarter bears and the dumber visitors intersect."

How love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

-Robert Frost, Putting in the Seed

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

"Someone sent me a postcard picture of the earth. On the back it said, 'Wish you were here.'"

"Creationism reveals its nonscientific character in two ways: its central tenets cannot be tested and its peripheral claims, which can be tested, have been proven false. At its core, the creationist account rests on "singularities" - that is to say, on miracles. The creationist God is not the noble clock winder of Newton and Boyle, who set the laws of nature properly at the beginning of time and then released direct control in full confidence that his initial decisions would require no revision. He is, instead, a constant presence, who suspends his own laws when necessary to make the new or destroy the old. Since science can treat only natural phenomena occurring in a context of invariant natural law, the constant invocation of miracles places creationism in another realm."

-Stephen Jay Gould

"Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."

-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophecy

"Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished."

-Francis Bacon

"The distorted shapes and unexpected colors of mushrooms fascinated me....They were ancient, wild things. No two were ever alike, and they had no roots to tie them to one place; like curiosity, they wandered everywhere."

"Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping cranes in higher esteem than people. It is up to science to spread the understanding that the choice is not between wild places or people. Rather, it is between a rich or an impoverished existence for Man."

-Thomas E. Lovejoy, World Wildlife Fund

Gardening Rule: When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.

-anon.

"Go gentle ... into the green."

-Charles de Lint, Into the Green

"There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty."

"There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty."

"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget."

-Thomas Szasz

"I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed."

-James Thurber

"There is something about dolphins. It is difficult to put into words..."

-Mark Carwardine

"All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than one lovely action."

-James Russell Lowell

"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within."

"Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience"

"He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower."

-Mary Howitt

"Everyone has their own 'personal tree' to sit in. Life's circumstances sometimes seem overwhelming, but we must remember the amazing power of love. Just as the ripples in the ocean shape and form the land, from the cliffs to the tiny grains of sand, so do our actions, words, and thoughts shape and form our reality. Even more, ripples joining one another form tidal waves that change the planet. If we make sure that our every thought, word, and action are based in love then the ripples we create will bring about positive change for a positive future."

-Julia Butterfly

"I was once walking through the forest alone. A tree fell right in front of me -- and I didn't hear it."

"In the 1850's the open country everywhere around San Francisco was a beautiful wildflower garden in the spring. In the region near Lake Merced the wildflowers were so thick that it was impossible to avoid stepping on them. There were California poppies, nemophilas, violets, cream cups, owls-clover, mouse-ear chickweed, Indian paintbrush, clovers, etc. The yellow violet, Viola pedunculata, was especially common, known to children as Johnny-jump-up. Today, new roads, golf links, vegetable fields, and human habitations have driven them away and it is doubtful if a single native flower persists."

-Alice Eastwood

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

-Edward Abbey

"Because we have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to survive, we are ready to give up everything, even our lives, in our struggle for justice."

-Cesar Chavez

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

-Albert Einstein

"Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Aesop's Fly, sitting on an axle of a chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: 'What a dust I do raise!'"

-Thomas Carlyle

"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."

-Sigmund Freud (about the Irish)

"When one considers the prodigious achievements of the profit motive in wrecking land, one hesitates to reject it as a vehicle for restoring land. I incline to believe we have overestimated the scope of the profit motive. Is it profitable for the individual to build a beautiful home? To give his children a higher education? No, it is seldom profitable, yet we do both. These are, in fact, ethical and aesthetic premises which underlie the economic system. Once accepted, economic forces tend to align the smaller details of social organization into harmony with them.
No such ethical and aesthetic premise yet exists for the condition of the land these children must live in. Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it."

-Leopold, Aldo: Round River, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 156-157

"Beauty is the gift of God."

"How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence."

-Benjamin Disraeli

"Keep close to Nature's heart ... and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean."

A reader pauses
Did he really smell sweet spring
Did he just read it?

-Jeanette Young

"All nature wears one universal grin."

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime, you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books-

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

-Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001

"Who am I? Where am I? What am I going to do about it."

-Margaret Meade

"Wildlife conservation is always a race against time. As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read."

-Mark Carwardine, Last Chance to See...

"Nearly half the water consumed in the United States now goes to grow feed for cattle and other livestock. To produce just one pound of grain-fed steak requires hundreds of gallons of water to irrigate feed crops consumed by the steer."

-Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

"Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society."

-Cesar Chavez

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made."

-Oscar Wilde

"Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves."

-Cesar Chavez

The loveliest flowers the closest cling to earth…
The happiest of Spring's happy, fragrant birth.

-John Keble, Spring Showers

Wisdom and foolishness
are practically the same.
Both are indifferent
to the opinions of the world.

-Joseph Campbell

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."

-John Muir

We make more enemies by what we say than friends by what we do.

-anon.

"Twenty percent more water than is now available will be needed to feed the additional three billion people who will be alive by 2025."

-World Commission on Water for the 21st Century

"But all conservation of wilderness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish."

-Aldo Leopold, Sketches Here and There

Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eye
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.

-John Milton, Lycides

"I'm not really a career person. I'm a gardener, basically."

-George Harrison

"Thank God I'm an atheist."

-Luis Bunuel

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from it's rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it,
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn
Indicative that suns go down
The notice to the startled grass
That darkness is about to pass.

-Emily Dickinson

"It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination."

-Henry David Thoreau

"Spring is in the air. The breeze is gentle with the smell of birthing, the earth radiates freshness, the birds sing with more abandon than they have for months."

-Barbara Dean, "Wellspring"

"We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should."

-Kurt Vonnegut

In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.

-Issa

"The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope
of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation."

"Where is my mind?"

-the Pixies, "Debaser"

"Before humans became civilized there were no weeds. Weeds are a product of civilization and cultivation."

-E.O. Wilson

"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science."

-Edwin Powell Hubble

"Every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love."

"A river of stars is lit across the heaven."

-Shih Ching, Ode #203, trans. Ezra pound

"The poetry of the earth is ceasing never."

-Keats, "On the Grasshopper and Cricket"

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

-Margaret Mead, from origination of Earth Day, 1969

"We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap."

-Kurt Vonnegut

"I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world... Perhaps you've seen it."

-Steven Wright

"Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything."

-Henri Poincare

"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits."

-Robert Heinlein

"That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds."

"The laws of biology are written in the language of diversity."

-E. O. Wilson

"We have only one choice: to conserve plants and live with them or destroy them and perish after them."

-Statement of Ugandan representative to 6th Conference of Parties to the Global Convention on Biological Diversity, April 12, 2002.

"Beware of the young doctor and the old barber."

-Benjamin Franklin

"Great is work which lends dignity to man."

-Babylonian Talmud

Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!

-Alfred Noyes, "The Highwayman"

"Governments are inherently incapable of appreciating what is perfect. In the name of the pragmatic and the practical, they choose the second best and end up with the third."

-Sir Edward Luytens (1869-1944), designer of British-built New Delhi

I am the only one.
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything.
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

-Edward Everett Hale

The tiny violet flowers
Hold up the vast and tender sky on petals
That are themselves the coming and going winds.
The very shadows of a sandstone rock
And nothing but black ants on the trail.

-David Schooley, “A Peace So Delicate”

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais"

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one."

-Mother Teresa

"It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese."

-Carl Sagan

"The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us..."

-John Muir

May is a white cloud behind pine trees
Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky.
May is green as no other,
May is much sun through small leaves,
May is soft earth,
And appleblossoms,
And windows open to a south wind.

-Amy Lowell

"I'm the commander--see, I don't need to explain--I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody any explanation."

-President Bush on Bob Woodward's Bush At War

"The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty, and truth."

-Albert Einstein

"My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, 'Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim.'"

-Paula Poundstone

"Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant?? I'm halfway through my fish burger and I realize, Oh my God....I could be eating a slow learner."

-Lynda Montgomery

"Every thing that lives is holy."

-William Blake

The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home.

-David Suzuki

"After a time, habituated to spending so many hours a day on my bike, I became less and less interested in my friends. I could rely on it, which is more than I could say about my buddies."

"The problem with endangered species is: You clear up one and another one comes along."

"The great end of life is not knowledge but action."

-T. H. Huxley

"There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them."

-Mark Carwardine, Last Chance to See...

"In wildness is the preservation of the world...Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called…simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap…

-Henry David Thoreau, Walking

"Back in 1989, a year after the publication of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, a brilliant physicist at a Cambridge college confessed to me that he had given up on page 28. "I couldn't make head nor tail of it," he said with total candour. The comment suggests that those who enjoyed Hawking's book the most probably understood it the least."

-John Cornwell, "The London Times"

"Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they've got. For clerks and students, factory workers and mechanics, the outdoors is freedom, just surely as it is for the folkloric and mythic figures. They don't have to own the outdoors, or get permission, or cut fences, in order to use it. It is public land, partly theirs, and that space is a continuing influence on their minds and senses. It encourages a fatal carelessness and destructiveness because it seems so limitless and because what is everybody's is nobody's responsibility. It also encourages, in some, an impassioned protectiveness: the battlegrounds of the environmental movement lie in the western public lands. Finally, it promotes certain needs, taste, attitudes, skills. It is those tastes, attitudes, and skills, as well as the prevailing destructiveness and it's corrective, love of the land, that relate real Westerners to the myth."

-Wallace Stegner, from Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur, 1987

"Day and night I was consumed by the computing, to see whether this idea would agree with the Copernican orbits, or if my joy would be carried away with the wind. Within a few days everything worked, and I watched as one body after another fit precisely into its place among the planets."

-Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), German astronomer, on his discovery of the laws of planetary motion

"If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive."

-Abraham Lincoln

"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."

-William Hazlitt

"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."

-Abraham Lincoln

"When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem."

-Edward Abbey

I meant to do my work to-day;
But a brown bird sang in the apple-tree
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.

-Richard Le Gallienne

"It was a violent case of mutual love at first sight, though neither party was aware of the fact..."

-Mark Twain

"Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism."

-David Suzuki

Quietly it came
one June afternoon.
Summer has arrived
at wood, in fields, on dune.

"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition."

-Isaac Asimov

"Old dogs, like old shoes, are comfortable. They might be a bit out of shape and a little worn around the edges, but they fit well."

-Bonnie Wilcox

"The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won't get much sleep."

-Woody Allen

"When in doubt, duck."

-Malcolm Forbes

"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly."

-R. Buckminster Fuller

"Goodall was in Pullman to deliver the annual Lane Family Lecture in Environmental Science. Speaking Thursday evening at Beasley Coliseum, Goodall outlined her four reasons for hope the world can recover its environmental heritage: humans are smart, young people are determined, the human spirit is indomitable and nature is resilient."

-anon.

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."

-Mark Twain

"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all commited for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft."

-Adlai Stevenson, 1965

"Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance being murdered as the average human."

-Jared Diamond, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee"

De sunflower ain't de daisy
And de melon ain't de rose
Why is dey all so crazy
To be sumpin' else dat grows?

-Edwin Milton Royle

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

-Albert Einstein

I've watched you now a full half hour
Self poised upon that yellow flower.
And little butterfly! Indeed,
I know not if you sleep or feed.
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Has found you out among the trees.

-William Wordsworth

"The life I value is one that is connected to all things."

-Willie Nelson

"I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position."

-Pat Conroy

"Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail."

-Henry Wheeler Shaw

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

-Groucho Marx

"In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you."

-Frank Wilczek

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."

-Isaac Asimov

"What is good about having a nice house without having a decent planet to put it on."

-Henry David Thoreau

"Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy."

-Groucho Marx

"There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot."

-Steven Wright

"Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done."

-Andy Rooney

"There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have."

-Don Herold

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered."

-GK Chesterton

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

"We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys."

-Eric Hoffer

"A politician will always be there when he needs you."

-Richard Smolik

"This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

-Soren Kierkegaard

"I bought some used paint. It was in the shape of a house."
-Steven Wright

"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."

-Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"

"In every grain of sand there is a story of earth."

"My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!"

"Nature does nothing uselessly."

"Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we scarcely mark their progress."

"I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex."

-Jack Handey, "Deep Thoughts"

"We deeply need the humility to know ourselves as dependent members of a great community of life, and this can indeed be one of the spiritual benefits of a wilderness experience."

-Howard Zahnhiser, Wilderness Act author

"Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down."

-Collis P. Huntingdon

"Take away wilderness and you take away the opportunity to be American."

-Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."

-J. R. R. Tolkien

"The more we know of other forms of life, the more we enjoy and respect ourselves... Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life."

-Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond with other species

"Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown"

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool."

-Richard Feynman, California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate

"Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid."

-Heinrich Heine

"If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability."

-Vannevar Bush

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

-Edward Abbey

"We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter."

-Jared Diamond

"Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired."

-Mark Twain

"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."

-Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack

"Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature."

-Matt Ridley

"I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale."

-Marie Curie

"When we can't dream any longer we die."

-Emma Goldman

"Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest."

-Bion

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."

"Weaving together the large and small fragments of natural habitat on both public and private lands is the only way to fully protect America's natural heritage. Even an acre of old timber, a remnant wetland, or an isolated spring often harbors hundreds of species, including many of threatened status. By inventing new economic incentives for conserving these special places on private lands, the spirit of wilderness can be taken literally to the grassroots and made more fully part of the national passion. Recognition and reward can engage the attention and win the support of landowners and local communities. These are the practical steps we must take to join our daily lives more fully with the natural world."

-E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

"He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them."

"No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing:  but most of the time, we aren't either."

"The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter; they are an entire banquet."

-Mark Twain

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

-Winston Churchill

I give her sadness and the gift of pain,
a new moon madness and a love of rain.

-Dorothy Parker "The Godmother"

Pardon me
Thou bleeding piece of earth
That I am meek and gentle
With these butchers.

- Shakespeare

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about."

"When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman."

-Joseph Wood Krutch

"Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us."

-Jerry Garcia

"Anyone who thinks humans are not capable of so fouling their own nest that the land and the waters can no longer be productive just hasn't been paying attention."

-Molly Ivins

"An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child."

-Carl Jung

"Environmentalists were no fun. They were like prohibitionists at the fraternity party...The tippping point will be occurring when the environment is no longer seen as a nag, but as a positive force in people's lives."

-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

"I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something."

-Jackie Mason

"We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong."

-Sir Arthur Eddington

"If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?"

"In the natural world, beautiful usually means deadly. Beautiful plus a casual demeanor always means deadly."

-E.O. Wilson, Naturalist

"Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness."

-Samuel Johnson

"Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong."

-George Carlin

"When you're addicted to drugs, you're told to cut off the supply. But when you're addicted to oil, you try to find more."

-Amory Lovins

"Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person."

-Mark Twain

"No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings."

-William Blake

"Five buzzards rise and circle in a sky of gathering grey cloud - a shifting pentagram of dark birds. They call in high, sharp voices, as silvered as the afternoon light.
There is some wing-flipping sparring. The birds' calls ring through the air as far below apples fall from the trees. A hummingbird hawk-moth visits late flowers, hovering, darting, vanishing like some shared exotic dream. On dusty paths iridescent green-bronze ground beetles run like predatory metal vehicles. A magnificent emperor dragonfly zooms through the air, flinging himself at every corner of his empire, leaving invisible beams of raw energy through space. All these animals have a powerful presence and a way of living that makes our own look feeble and ill-adapted. So what happened to crane-flies?
In through the open window comes a daddy-long-legs, a wraith cursed with a comedy body, too much legs with too little wings. It jerks and dithers to reach the light bulb in a spindly, suicidal joke. There is something arcane about the misfit crane-flies and there are thousands of them around at the moment. After spending all that time underground, munching grass roots, the grubs - leatherjackets - have transformed, on some predetermined signal, to act out the punchline of their lives. In the day they cluster on warm walls. At night they seek out light bulbs and candle flames, as if feeding on light itself is enough, especially light that will kill them. I am developing a great respect for daddy-long-legs, in whom I recognise so much of ourselves."

- Paul Evans, Guardian Weekly, 26/9/06

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

-John Muir

"You woke up in the morning and thought: here I am where I ought to be."

-Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

"Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

-Elie Wiesel

"Something in the insect seems to be alien to the habits, morals, and psychology of this world, as if it had come from some other planet: more monstrous, more energetic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than our own."

-Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949)

"There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer."

-J.H. Goldfuss

"I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar on my shelf."

-Robert Bloch

La Marseillaise

Allons enfants de la Patrie,            Ye sons of France, awake to glory,
Le jour de gloire est arrive          Hark, hark, what myriads bid you rise!
Contre nous, de la tyrannie,              Your children, wives & grandsires hoary,
L'etendard sanglant est leve            Behold their tears and hear their cries!
L'etendard sanglant est leve.           Behold their tears and hear their cries!
Entendez vous, dans les campagnes       Shall hateful tyrants mischief breeding
Mugir ces farouches soldats.            With hireling hosts, a ruffian band
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras            Affright and desolate the land,
Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes.         While peace and liberty lie bleeding?
Aux armes citoyens!                        To arms, to arms, ye brave!
Formez vos bataillons,                       Th'avenging sword unsheathe!
Marchon, Marchons!                  March on!  March on!
Qu'un sang impur                    All hearts resolved
Abreuve nos sillons                  On victory or death.

-English translation of first verse by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

"My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted."

-Steven Wright

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."

-George Bernard Shaw

"No human thing is of serious importance."

-Plato

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

-HG Wells

"Of all the patterns in nature, one of the simplest, yet hardest to unpick, is that the further you travel from the tropics, the fewer species there are. This trend is found both by land and by sea, and applies to a vast range of different organisms. Despite the pattern's simplicity, though, its explanation is elusive, and the quest to find that explanation is one of the enduring themes of ecology....By a process of elimination, the three researchers were left with the conclusion that, by pushing metabolic rates up, tropical heat causes more mutation and thus more speciation. In other words, evolution happens at a faster rate in Kenya than, say, in Kansas. It does, though, occur in Kansas, too--whatever some of its citizens might think."
-Excerpted from The Economist, 6 May 2006

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

-Upton Sinclair

"The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough."

-Rabindranath Tagore

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

"Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction."

-Goethe

"That all things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain."

-Sir Francis Bacon

When you are deluded
and full of doubt, even a
thousand books of scripture
are not enough.
When you have realized
understanding, even one
word is too much.

-Fen-Yang

"Make the Pie Higher"

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

-poem composed of actual quotes from George W. Bush

"Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear."

-Zora Neale Hurston

"Why should I give my Readers bad lines of my own when good ones of other people's are so plenty?"

-Benjamin Franklin

"The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials."

-Chinese proverb

"One result of the evolution of our sun through the red giant phase will very likely be the reduction of our earth to a bleak, charred cinder."

-Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1966

"What if someone gave a war and nobody came?"

-Allen Ginsberg

"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government."

-Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 14, 1938, Fireside Chat

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

"I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts."

-John Steinbeck

"Evolution is the blind shuffle of DNA, filtered by success of reproduction."

-Hattie Ellis

"When land is divided and developed, it ceases being land. It becomes covered, consumed, sealed. It becomes its own grave."

-Joy Williams, One Acre

"The goal of life is living in agreement with nature."

-Zeno, 335 B.C.

"As it turns out, red squirrels like to nest and store food in witches' brooms.  One of their favorite foods is a quite different fungus, a truffle-like species that grows underground.  In the course of digging up the mushrooms, eating some and carrying others to their nests, the squirrels drop dung pellets full of spores, seeding the fungus across the forest floor.

"Mushrooms, remember, are only the fruiting bodies of certain fungi.  The organism itself is mainly a web of long, thin threads spread throughout the soil.  When those threads associate with the roots of a tree, they are called mycorrhizae.  Nearly all trees support mycorrhizae, which in turn extract moisture and nutrients from pores in the soil too microscopic for even the tree's finest root hairs to penetrate.  This is one of the most important symbiotic relationships in nature.  The particular species of fungus spread by the squirrels forms the mycorrhizae that associate with white spruce.  They are a key to its ability to survive on cold, nutrient-poor soils at the very northern edge of treeline.
 
"When you consider that the rust fungus requires a second host to complete its life cycle, and that this other host is the arctic huckleberry bush, a prime food source for grizzly bears, foxes, ptarmigans, and an array of smaller birds and mammals, you can see that an odd-looking clump of needles on a white spruce is much more than an unfortunate case of blight.  It is an intersection in an almost inconceivably wide and elaborate network of paths."

-Douglas H. Chadwick, "Seeking Meanings," Endangered Species, Vol. 3 #3, Summer 1993

"The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men."

-George Eliot

Flowers are words
Which even a baby may understand.

-Arthur C. Coxe, The Singing of Birds

"And when I get real, real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving."

Across the lonely beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I;
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood, bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit;
One little sandpiper and I.

"Yet people are beginning to suspect that the greatest freedom is not achieved by sheer irresponsibility.  The earth is common ground and we are its overlords, whether we hold title or not. Gradually the idea is taking form that the land must be held in safe keeping, that one generation is to some extent responsible to the next, and that it is contrary to the public good to allow an individuals to destroy almost beyond repair any part of the soil or the water or even the view!"

- E. B. White

"One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done."

-Marie Curie

"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water."

-Loren Eiseley

"The truly brave, When they behold the brave oppressed with odds, Are touched with a desire to shield and save:-- A mixture of wild beasts and demi-gods Are they--now furious as the sweeping wave, Now moved with pity; even as sometimes nods The rugged tree unto the summer wind, Compassion breathes along the savage mind."

-Lord Byron, Don Juan (canto VIII, st. 106)

"We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher' answer - but none exists."

-Stephen Jay Gould

"I'm a vegetarian for health reasons: the health of the chickens."

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Nature, like an enthusiastic gardener, could not resist the temptation to plant flowers everywhere."

-John Muir

"In October the great restlessness came, the Zugunruhe, the restlessness of birds before migration. After a long, unseasonable hot spell, one morning dawned suddenly cold. The birds were excited, stammering new songs all day long. Titmice, which had hidden in the leafy shade of mountains all summer, perched on the gutter; chickadees staged a conventicle in the locusts, and a sparrow, acting very strange, hovered like a hummingbird inches above a roadside goldenrod."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Nature speaks in symbols and signs."

-John Greenleaf Whittier

"It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time."

-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (Part 1)

"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible."

-Jean Kerr

"Healing the broken bond between our young and nature is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demand it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depend on it."

-Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

"The coward calls the brave man rash, the rash man calls him a coward."

-Aristotle

"It can seem as you look out that it's just chaos and that we behave in terrible ways and we never really seem to get better. But we have to remember that compassion and love and altruism is equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage. They are just as evident in chimpanzees as the brutal, aggressive side of chimpanzee nature. We humans, therefore, have a choice ahead of us, we don't have to go the aggressive route. We can push and push and push towards love and compassion. That is where I believe human destiny ultimately is taking us."

-Jane Goodall

"One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this."

-Don Quixote

"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause."

-P.J. O'Rourke

"Scientists are to science what masons are to cathedrals."

-E.O. Wilson, the Creation

"Indecision may or may not be my problem."

-Jimmy Buffett

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,
people have named the seals. Every seal
is named Earl because they are killed one
after another by the orca, the killer
whale; seal bodies tossed left and right
into the air. “At least he didn't get
Earl,” someone says. And sure enough,
after a time, that same friendly,
bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.
It's Earl again. Well, how else are you
to live except by denial, by some
palatable fiction, some little song to
sing while the inevitable, the black and
white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling
toward you out of the deep?

-Louis Jenkins, “Earl”

"Zwar der Tapfere nennt sich Herr der Lander Durch sein Eisen, durch sein Blut."
"The brave man, indeed, calls himself lord of the land, through his iron, through his blood."

-Ernst Moritz Arndt

"Akela, the great gray Lone Wolf who led all the Pack by strength and cunning, lay out at full length on his rock, and below him sat forty or more wolves of every size and color, from badger-colored veterans who could handle a buck alone, to young black three-year-olds who thought they could."

-Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

"Indecision may or may not be my problem."

-Jimmy Buffett

"Not just any city can claim to have formed in a trench where the slab of a great ocean dived toward the center of the earth, where large pieces of vari-colored country came together, and where competent rock was crushed to scaly clay. After the churning stopped and whole mixture was lifted into the weather, the more solid chunks very soon stood high and the softer stuff washed down...."

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

-William Shakespeare, “As You Like It”

"Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."

-George Bernard Shaw

SAM: What'd you like, Normie?
NORM: A reason to live. Give me another beer.

-Cheers

"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog."

-Jack London

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."

-Steven Hawking

"Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume. Whosoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found... Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena--care not to understand the architecture of the Heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!"

-Herbert Spencer

"True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen."

-La Rochefoucauld

Tomorrow never comes.

"There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible."

-Samuel Johnson

murder for a jar of red rum

-palindrome

Quantity of beauty required to launch a single ship: 1 Millihelen.

-Schott's Original Miscellany

"When combined, all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings."

-Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants

"I was familiar with storms, and enjoyed them, knowing well that in right relations with them they are ever kindly."

-John Muir

"We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune."

-Theodore Roosevelt

"Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle."

-Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron), Don Juan (canto VIII, st. 106)

"Those who find beauty in all of nature will find themselves at one with the secrets of life itself."

-L.W. Gilbert

"Out of this wood do not desire to go."

-William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

"Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees."

-David Letterman

"There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before."

-Robert Lynd

"The Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park looks as though it had been contrived overnight of gossamer and the wings of moths."

-Margot Patterson Doss

"At Saturday noon, on November third, a few days before the last general election, I rowed a small skiff into the current of the Colorado River, near the town of Moab, Utah, and disappeared for ten days. By choice. Since I lacked the power to make a somewhat disagreeable world of public events disappear, I chose to disappear from that world myself... I preferred this kind of solitude not out of selfishness but out of generosity; in my sullen mood I was doing my fellow humans (such as they are) a favor by going away."

-Edward Abbey, River Solitaire: A Daybook

"Which month is cruelest?"
I.  Newton, Cambridge, England
T.S. Eliot, treasurer of the Dead Poets Society, replies:
" April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.  November, also very bad."

- From Scientific American , April 2003 "Ask the Experts" column

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught."

-Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist

Way back in the days when the grass was still green
and the pond was still wet
and the clouds were still clean,
and the song of the Swomee-Swans rang out in space...
one morning, I came to this glorious place.
And I first saw the trees!

-Dr. Seuss, the Lorax

"He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical."

-GK Chesterton

"One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

-Woody Allen

"Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind."

-Marston Bates

"It was Andrew Lawson who, in 1895, named the rock Franciscan. He assumed that they were a conventional formation with traceable stratigraphy-with an eroded structure that could nonetheless be deciphered and spatially reconstructed. One might as well empty a cement mixer and try to number the pebbles in the order in which they entered the machine....."

"I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."

"When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash -at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the ‘newness,' the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance."

-Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

"Wilderness is rich with liberty."

-Wordsworth

"Nature is not a place to visit, it is home."

-Gary Snyder

"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have the things about us."

"It doesn't make a difference what temperature a room is, it's always room temperature."

-Steven Wright

"Who does not thank for little will not thank for much."

"Gratitude is the sign of noble souls."

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

"Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart."

"After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'"

-William S. Burroughs

"I like to skate on the other side of the ice ..."

At my door the pale horse stands
To carry me to unknown lands.

-John Hay

"To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other."

-Jack Handy

"The children the world almost break become the adults who save it."

-Frank Warren

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."

-ee cummings

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

-Aldo Leopold

"True bravery is shown by performing without witness what one might be capable of doing before all the world!"

-Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

A bird the size
of a leaf fills
the whole lucid
evening with
his note, and flies.

-Wendell Berry

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed."

-Herman Melville

"A species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all."

-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

"Each tree has its own name and its own personality. You have only to touch them and open your mind. Make your mind empty of all things that are about you, blank as a blue sky, and wait for the tree to give you its thoughts."

-Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland

"Let our people travel light and free on their bicycles."

-Edward Abbey

"One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation."

-Walter Scott

"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."

-David Brin

"All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today."

-Chinese proverb

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

-Benjamin Franklin

"Bless us Lord, this Christmas, with quietness of mind; Teach us to be patient and always to be kind."

-Helen Steiner Rice

Heap on the wood!-the wind is chill; But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our Christmas merry still.

-Sir Walter Scott

"It's a dangerous business going out your front door."

-JRR Tolkien

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

-Joseph Stalin

"I would like to go into perfectly new and wild country. I wish to lose myself amid reeds and sedges and wild grasses that have not been touched."

- Thoreau

"I can only think of one experience which might exceed in interest a few hours spent under water, and that would be a journey to Mars."

-William Beebe, The Arcturus Adventure

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, do the other trees make fun of it?"

-Steven Wright

"Outer space is no place for a person of breeding."

-Lady Violet Bonham Carter

"Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else."

-James Thorpe

"Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?"

-James Thurber

"Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it's worse when they are wearing dark glasses and have streamers in their antlers because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot."

-Ellen DeGeneres

"Some of the little magic left in the world is infused in trains."

-Jack Kodiak

"Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience"

"Don't expect too much of Christmas Day. You can't crowd into it any arrears of unselfishness and kindliness that may have accrued during the past twelve months."

-Oren Arnold

"In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous."

-Aristotle

"When most people step beyond the city, what they first hear is silence. But if they listen closely, they can hear voices: Birdsong. The incessant chirp and buzz of insects. Water gurgling in a stream. A frog parliament, arguing down by a pond. Summer sounds.
It's in the winter that the silence is more profound. Sometimes it seems like all that exists is the sound of the wind. The world is dreaming, hidden under the ice and snow, waiting for spring.
Wonder and Mystery are caught in a kind of winter these days. We don't have time for them anymore; they no longer seem relevant. But their relevance can't be measured by the same yardstick that we use to measure everything else. Understanding, not what they are, but that they are, is what's important.
Remembering them now is almost a gift."

"Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank him for not having given it wings."

-Indian Proverb

The air is like a butterfly
With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks at the sky
And sings.

-Joyce Kilmer

"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

-H.L. Mencken

"I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there."

-Herb Caen

From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
From the laziness that is content with half­truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truths,
O God of Truth, deliver us.

-ancient prayer

"The world is dangerous not because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything. Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe by raising my voice I can help the greatest of all causes ... goodwill among men and peace on earth."

-Albert Einstein

"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."

-Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

"How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world."

-Shakespeare

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

-Aldo Leopold

"When you observe you start seeing things."

-Yogi Berra

"I care to live only to entice people to look at nature's loveliness."

-John Muir

I dreamt—marvelous error—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my past mistakes.

-Antonio Machado, “Last Night As I Was Sleeping”

"Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back."

-Publilius Syrus

"Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings."

-Evan Esar

"Our good fortune will only last as long as our natural resources"

-Will Rogers

"When one considers the prodigious achievements of the profit motive in wrecking land, one hesitates to reject it as a vehicle for restoring land. I incline to believe we have overestimated the scope of the profit motive. Is it profitable for the individual to build a beautiful home? To give his children a higher education? No, it is seldom profitable, yet we do both. These are, in fact, ethical and aesthetic premises which underlie the economic system. Once accepted, economic forces tend to align the smaller details of social organization into harmony with them. No such ethical and aesthetic premise yet exists for the condition of the land these children must live in. Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it."

-Aldo Leopold, Round River

"Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavor."

-William Cowper

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

-Helen Keller

Earth gives life and seeks the man who walks gently upon it.

-Hopi legend

Stones and trees speak slowly
and may take a week
to get out a single sentence.
And there are few men,
unfortunately, with the
patience to wait
for an oak to finish a thought.

-Garrison Keillor, “Buds”

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left."

The earth is a garden and each of us only need
care for our own part for life to be breathed back
into the planet, into the soil, into ourselves.

-John Jeavons

In the hope of reaching the moon
men fail to see the flowers
that blossom at their feet.

-Albert Schweitzer

"If man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."

-Dr. Martin Luther King

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."

-Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)

"In the beginning of everything we had fireworks of unimaginable beauty. Then there was an explosion followed by the filling of the heavens with smoke. We came too late to do more than visualize the splendor of creation's birthday."

-George Lemaitre, Belgian cosmologist, The New York Times, Jan. 12, 1933

My life is like a stroll upon the beach
As near the ocean's edge as I can go.

-Thoreau, “The Fisher's Boy”

"If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough."

- Mario Andretti

"Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from."

-Al Franken

"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone's throw of the shore (Terra Del Fuego), over which the beech tree extended its branches."

-Darwin

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."

-African proverb

"Be cheerful, even after considering all the facts."

-Wendell Berry

"It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

-Elizabeth Kolbert, The Climate of Man, New Yorker, 9 May 2005

"Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain."

-Mark Twain

"Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport. Sport is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor. Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are... given 12-gauge shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway) in the woods if that happened."

-R. Lerner, letter, Sierra, March-April 1991

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."

-Sir Winston Churchill

"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonderful."

-M.C. Escher

The Pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee­
A Clover, any time, to him,
Is Aristocracy­

-Emily Dickinson

"I like to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God must speaks to us every hour, if we only will tune in."

-George Washington Carver

"Henceforth space by itself, and time itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

-Hermann Minkowski, lecturer in Cologne, 1908, Einstein's mathematics professor

"There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."

-Salvador Dali

"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves."

-Che Guevara

"Once my husband invited guests to dinner on the day I had just purchased a large quantity of pinkie mice at a local reptile show. Because several hundred of my largest tarantulas were housed in our formal dining room, conversation at dinner that evening was punctuated by the squeals of dying mice. It was an experience our guests seemed to find unnerving."

-Joy Reed, "Oh, Give Me a Home Where the A. hentzi Roam," Forum Magazine of the American Tarantula Society, vol. 13, no. 3, 2004

"Spring would not be spring without bird songs."

-Francis M. Chapman

"We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong."

-Sir Arthur Eddington

"If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either."

-Dick Cavett

Love and smoke are two things which can't be concealed.

-French proverb

"May I print a kiss upon your lips?" I said,
And she nodded her full permission;
So we went to press and I rather guess
We printed a full edition.

-Joseph Lilienthal

"Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo."

-Infantry Journal

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others."

"[W]e seem ultimately always thrown back on individual ethics as the basis of conservation policy. It is hard to make a man, by pressure of law or money, do a thing which does not spring naturally from his own personal sense of right and wrong."

-Aldo Leopold: Conservationist in Mexico, American Forests, March 1937. Reproduced in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, edited by David E. Brown & Neil B. Carmony, University of New Mexico Press, 1990, pg. 207

"Si quis in caelum ascendisset, ibique solem, et lunam, et sidera prope vidisset, hoc tamen sibi injucundum fore, ni aliquem qui narraret habuisset."

"If someone had ascended to the heavens, and had had a close view of the sun, the moon and the stars, this would nevertheless give him no pleasure if he had no one to whom he could recount it."

-Cicero

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon.

-Edward Lear "The Owl and the Pussycat"

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
has broken Nature's social union.

-Robert Burns

"God is subtle, but not malicious."

-Einstein

"If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"From a grain of sand to a great mountain, all is sacred. Yesterday and tomorrow exist eternally upon this continent. We natives are the guardians of this sacred place."

-Peter Blue Cloud, Mohawk

"In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."

-Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom."

-George Bernard Shaw

"There will come a time when the world will look back to modern vivisection in the name of science, as they do now to burning at the stake in the name of religion."

-Henry J. Bigelow, M.D. (1818­1890)

"If a ferret bites you it is nearly always your own fault."

-Phil Drabble

"When the gods want to punish us they answer our prayers."

-Oscar Wilde

"These temple destroyers, devotees of raving commercialism, seem to have perfect contempt for nature. Instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the Mountains, they lift them to the Almighty Dollar."

-John Muir

"Oh joy, rapture! I've got a brain."

-Scarecrow, The Wizard of Oz

"There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."

-Jim Hightower

"God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for opression and bloodshed."

-director Luis Bunuel

"The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it."

-Goldoni

"Great criminals bear about them a kind of predestination which makes them surmount all obstacles."

-Dumas

"When a woman has ceased to be quite the same to us, it matters little how different she becomes."

-Landor

"These are the times that try men's souls."

-Thomas Paine

"Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God."

-Lenny Bruce

I can't go on.
You must go on.
I'll go on.

-Samuel Beckett

Hoch klingt das Lied vom braven Mann,
Wie Orgelton und Glockenklang;
Wer hohes Muths sich ruhmen kann Den lohnt nicht Gold, den lohnt Gesang.

Song of the brave, how thrills thy tone
As when the Organ's music rolls;
No gold rewards, but song alone,
The deeds of great and noble souls.

-Gottfried Augustus Burger, "Lied von Braven Mann"

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

-Pablo Picasso

"When I came to ponder the keys to their survival, the field widened, and I realised that elephant ecology and survival can only be considered in relation to what men believe and how they behave."

-Ian Douglas Hamilton, “Among the Elephants”

"The hills have risen rapidly and have therefore eroded steeply. They're still rising rapidly. San Francisco streets were drawn on paper, without regard to geology or topography. There is one reaction. You laugh..."

-John McPhee, Assembling California

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."

-Audubon

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed... if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence."

-Wallace Stegner

"It is better to exist unknown to the law."

-Irish Proverb

"Happiness is the ability to recognize it."

-Carolyn Wells

"Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology."

-Rebecca West

"One of the things I keep learning is that the secret of being happy is doing things for other people."

-Dick Gregory

"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universes, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act."

-Charles Darwin

"Nature writes, gardeners edit."

-Roger Swain

"I married Miss Right. It was only later that I found her first name was Always."

-Guy Noir (Garrison Keillor)

"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."

-Frank Lloyd Wright

"Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex."

-Dan Greenburg

Describe him?...That's hard. I don't know if I can.
He was shortish. And oldish.
And brownish. And mossy.
And he spoke with a voice
that was sharpish and bossy.
“Mister!” he said with a sawdusty sneeze,
“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.”

-Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

"This'll be interesting."

-Jack Kodiak

"Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time."

-Stephen Pinker, "How The Mind Works"

"And ‘tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes."

-William Wordsworth, Lines Written in Early Spring

"To create a little flower is the labour of ages."

-William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

"To be a fool at the right time is also an art."

-anon.

This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands.

-William Butler Yeats, "Another Song of a Fool"

Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
the flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

-King Solomon, Old Testament

"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."

-Rachel Carson

"I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven."

-Emily Dickinson

"Nature is the art of God."

-Dante Alighieri

"The optical tube...it has pleased me to call, after the model of the telescope, the microscope, because it permits a view of minute things."

-John Faber, naturalist, 1625

"What is the color of the wind?"

-Zen koan

"Synthetic pesticides for example, target basic physiological processes, but are so crudely nonspecific in their application that, each year, pesticide use results in about 220,000,000 human poisonings and 220,000 fatalities worldwide. By one estimate, the environmental and public health costs of pesticides exceed nine billion dollars per year in the United States alone."

-May Berenbaum, Friendly Fire, 2004

"Nothing exists nor happens in the visible sky that is not sensed in some hidden manner by the faculties of Earth and Nature: (so that) these faculties of the spirit here on earth are as much affected as the sky itself."

-Johannes Kepler, De Stella Nova, 1609

"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it."

-Rita Mae Brown

"A species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all."

-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

"Greater San Francisco, the most beautiful urban landscape in the United States, just will not be inconvenienced by a system of sibling faults. Less than a year after the major earthquake of 1989, a modest (1400 square foot) two-bedroom house in the Marina, the most devastated residential district in San Francisco, could be had for five hundred and sixteen thousand dollars, a fall of barely ten percent from pre-earthquake prices..."

-John McPhee, Assembling California

"Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them."

-Dr. Martin Henry Fischer

"Well, folks, you'll soon see a baked Appel."

-George Appel, on his way to the electric chair, 1928

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless."

-Thomas A. Edison

"A clear breeze has no price, the bright moon no owner."

-Song Hun

"When we are with Nature, we are awake, and we discover many interesting things and reach many a mark we are not aiming at."

-John Muir

"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."

-Fred Allen

"Let us a little permit Nature to take her own ways; she better understands her own affairs than we."

-Montaigne

"A tree's a tree ­ how many more do you need to look at?"

-Ronald Reagan, during his campaign for governor of California. Reagan was elected by an overwhelming majority.

"Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is."

-Will Rogers

"Watch out for that thing."

-Jack Kodiak

"To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe."

-Jean-Paul Sartre

"As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature's sources never fail. Like a generous host, she offers her brimming cup in endless variety, served in a grand hall, the sky its ceiling, the mountains its walls, decorated with glorious paintings and enlivened with the bands of music ever playing."

-John Muir

"We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive."

-Aldo Leopold, Round River

How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,
By all their country's wishes blest! . . . .
By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung.

-William Collins, Ode, written in 1746

Resist much
Obey little

-Whitman

As the highwayman's life is the fullest of zest,
So the highwayman's death is the briefest and best;
He dies not as other men die, by degrees,
But at once! without flinching- and quite at his ease.

-William Harrison Ainsworth, 1834

"You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred."

-Woody Allen

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

-John Adams

"At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years."

-Arthur C. Clarke

"There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel."

-Franklin P. Adams

"I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place."

-Steven Wright

"If the Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me"

-Jimmy Buffett

"Patience is the companion of wisdom."

-Augustine

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

-Henry David Thoreau

"Nature does nothing uselessly."

-Aristotle

"She's descended from a long line her mother listened to."

-Gypsy Rose Lee

"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."

"Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!"

-Henry David Thoreau

This planet is not terra firma.
It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for.
It's lonely.
It's small.
It's isolated, and there is no resupply.
And we are mistreating it.

"It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up."

-W. Somerset Maugham

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."

-Bertrand Russell

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried up at once; a shower is always falling; vapor rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."

-John Muir

"Without natural resources, life itself is impossible."

-Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the U.S. Forest Service

"The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard."

-Gaylord Nelson

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history--with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."

-Mitch Ratliffe

And was there not one moment in time
when our liberated adventurer
might have felt himself to be
a new unique form of life on earth
Was there not one moment when he felt
a quivering a wavering vibe
between himself and all breathing beings
and a deep ineffable delight
engulfing him
as if he were not a man separate and apart
from the rest of creation
but a part of pure nature
without the hubris to destroy it—

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stockponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears, and cougars on sight; supplants native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West."

-Edward Abbey, from a speech in Missoula, Montana

Two birds fly past.
They are needed somewhere.

-Robert Bly

We don't need a lot of money,
We'll be sleeping on the beach,
Keeping oceans within reach,
Whatever private oceans we can conjure up for free.

-Over the Rhine

One ought,
every day at least,
to hear a little song,
read a good poem,
see a fine picture,
and,
if it were possible,
to speak a few reasonable words.

-Goethe

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The mouth of a perfectly happy man is filled with beer."

-Ancient Egyptian wisdom

"The best way to be beautiful is to choose your parents well."

-Candice Bergen

"I think biology must be one of the most satisfying careers because the things you are studying are so absolutely and endlessly real and interesting and directly important. You never have to doubt the validity and interest of what you are doing."

-Peter Raven

I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces
I sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains
I sing my song to the free.

-Pete Townshend "Song is Over"

"Nature has neither kernel nor shell; she is everything at once."

-Goethe

"There is no excellent beauty that does not have some strangeness in the proportion."

- Francis Bacon

"In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000.  They consulted experts who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff".  When the company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem would be the environment.  "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business.  And of course that's almost exactly what's happened", says Lovelock.
"Lovelock, 88, has been predicting..since the mid-1960s, and his accuracy has made him one of Britain's most respected independent scientists.  He invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped track the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism.  Initially ridiculed, it now forms the basis of almost all climate science.
"For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists, but recently many have come around to his way of thinking.  His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater.  The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report deploys less dramatic language but its calculations aren't a million miles from his.
"...More alarming even than his climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong...the Daily Mail launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags.  The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco-ideas premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet.  This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy.  "It's just too late for it.  Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped.  But we don't have time."  Recycling is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to "ostentatious grand gestures".  He distrusts ethical consumption.  "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam.  Or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."...He saves his thunder for the emptiest false promise:  renewable energy.  "You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours.  Windmills!  Oh no.  No way of doing it.  You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them.  Waste of time."
"...The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance will come not from less technology, but more.  Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem.  The bigger challenge will be food.  "Maybe they'll synthesise food...He fears we wont invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100.
"...What would Lovelock do now, (the writer) asks, if he were me?  He smiles and says:  "Enjoy life while you can.  Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

-Guardian Weekly, excerpted by Jake Sigg

"Let us talk sense to the American people. Let us tell them the truth, that there are no gains without  pains."

-Adlai Stevenson

"Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move."

-John A. Wheeler

"Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?"

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"The mathematician does not study pure mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful."

-Henri Poincare

"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got ‘til it's gone?"

-Joni Mitchell

"The true mystery of the world is not in the invisible, but in the visible."

-Oscar Wilde

"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge."

-Paul Gauguin

"He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."

-Saki

"Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything."

-Floyd Dell

"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad."

-Diogenes the Cynic

"If you want to go on with this silly adventure it's yours not mine."

-Bilbo Baggins

"No matter how little money and how few possessions you own, having a dog makes you rich."

-Louis Sabin

"There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody."

-Adlai Stevenson

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
There is more day to dawn.
The sun is but a morning star.

-Henry David Thoreau

"…water drops have worn the stones of Troy and blind oblivion swallowed cities up."

-Shakespeare

"Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."

- Blaise Pascal

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."

-Samuel Johnson

"We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."

-John W. Gardner (1912-2002)

"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision."

-Lynn Lavner

"No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session."

-Benjamin Franklin

"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."

-Leo Tolstoy

"No, sir: There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn."

-Samuel Johnson

"Communism is like one big phone company."

-Lenny Bruce

"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little."

-George Carlin

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"

"The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it."

-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."

-Paul Valery

"I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines."

-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

-Anais Nin

"She saw objectives, not obstacles."

-Wallace Stegner

"When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?"

-Don Marquis

"A technique succeeds in mathematical physics, not by a clever trick, or a happy accident, but because it expresses some aspect of a physical truth."

-O. G. Sutton

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."

-Nikola Tesla

"If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?"

-Marquise de Sévigné (French writer and lady of fashion) February 11, 1677

"The universe is wider than our views of it."

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

-Ernest Dowson, 1867-1900

"Babies don't need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach... it pisses me off! I'll go over to a little baby and say 'What are you doing here? You haven't worked a day in your life!'"

"Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions."

-Evan Esar

I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach;
But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech.
Hold to thine ear
And plain thou'lt hear
     Tales of ships.

-Charles Henry (John Paul) Webb (1834‹1905), With a Nantucket Shell

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man in the moon.

-Harry Chapin, "Cat's In the Cradle"

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

-Robert Frost

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas

"By ignorance the truth is known."

-Henry Suso, The Little Book of Truth (1300-65)

"Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that he sometimes has to eat them."

-Adlai Stevenson

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exits elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

-Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania some time of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.

-William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night's Dream”

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."

-Albert Camus

Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"[....] We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock. In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes‹something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

"Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle."

-Jared Diamond, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee"

"Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday."

-Oscar Wilde, a remark concerning his brother's fondness for drink

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."

-George Carlin

"The honey is sweet, but the bee has a sting."

-Benjamin Franklin

"The door had been forced, as forced as the dialogue during the interview portion of 'Jeopardy!'"

-anon.

"I've just trodden in something rural."

-Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

"I wandered to the well. Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart. I pushed the faded vines aside and dipped my hand into the water. Wind rippled it, and my splashing; it would not give me my reflection. But it tasted of those great dreaming clouds, and of the bright winds and broken pieces of blue sky its trembling waters caught.
It tasted of the last sun before winter."

-Patricia A. McKillip, Winter Rose

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

-Martin Luther King Jr.,Strength to Love, 1963

"I feel nearly certain ...that any civilization we contact will be far wiser than we. To think we are the best the universe could manage - the mediocrity of it all!"

-Paul Horowitz, physicist, cited by Gregg Easterbrook, Atlantic, August 1988

Our whatever
Who art somewhere
Hallowed be thy name or names
as the case may be

-Garrison Keillor, inter-denominational prayer

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong."

-Robert Louis Stevenson

"The last fallen mahogany would lie perceptibly on the landscape, and the last black rhino would be obvious in its loneliness, but a marine species may disappear beneath the waves unobserved and the sea would seem to roll on the same as always."

-G. Carleton Ray in "Biodiversity", National Academy Press, 1988

"The actual flower is the plant's highest fulfilment, and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant geography: they are here first of all for delight."

-John Ruskin

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."

-Bertrand Russell

Come ye into the summer woods;
There entereth no annoy;
All greenly wave the chestnut leaves,
And the earth is full of joy.

-Mary Howitt

"I always feel rejuvenated by a touch of adventure."

-Baron Munchausen

"Art has roots in nature. In natural ecosystems, masses of the dominant plant species lend the landscape its visual cohesiveness, while scattered drifts of plants adapted to special niches add the diversity that guarantees ecosystem stability. In a garden, a strong framework of trees and shrubs defines the space, while grasses and wildflowers add the grace notes that make it unique. Unity and variety are complementary parts of the whole.  Strong lines and repetition are unifying elements, while a mix of complementary plants keep things interesting. Harmony, growing from a sense of place and respect for natural processes, is the essence of ecogardening. It allows for participation in the cycle of the seasons, the comings and goings of birds and insects, the change from leafy canopy to stark skeletons of tree limbs against a usually blue but sometimes brooding sky. It is having places to be idle in the cool shade of a tree or vine canopy and places to bask in the warmth of the mellow winter sun. It is always having a few weeds to pull when pulling hair isn't socially acceptable, but never having so many weeds that they aren't fairly easy to ignore when you want to be in the garden but not work in it."

-Judith Phillips, Natural by Design

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."

-John Muir

"Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee."

-F. Lee Bailey

"My house is made out of balsa wood. When no one is home across the street, except the little kids, I come out and lift my house up over my head. I tell them to stay out of my yard or I'll throw it at them."

How sweet I roamed from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride.

-William Blake, “Song”

"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."

-H. L. Mencken

"Natura enim non imperatur, nisi parendo."
"Nature cannot be ordered about, except by obeying her."

-Sir Francis Bacon

"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."

-Aesop (6th century B.C.)

"A calamity is a time of great opportunity."

-Chinese maxim

"The lack of popular interest in the natural history sciences, failing some other cultivated interest, is unfortunate both for the individual and for the community....
The natural surroundings of Californians are singularly rich and varied. A scientific interest in at least certain features of our natural environment, as for example the trees, shrubs or herbaceous plants, directs one to useful and agreeable intellectual activity. Accurate and detailed knowledge of even a small area lifts the possessor out of the commonplace and enables him directly or indirectly to contribute to the well-being and happiness of his community."

-Willis Jepson, Trees of California, 1923

"Art is science made clear."

-Jean Cocteau

"Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft--and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor."

-Werner von Braun

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

-Philip K. Dick

"The man who cannot wonder,' wrote Carlyle, ‘were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mecanique Celeste and Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head, ­is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful."

-from Great Essays in Science

"There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question of whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free."

-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

"A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers."

-Bertrand Russell

"When the well's dry, we'll know the value of water."

-Benjamin Franklin

"America is built on a tilt and everything loose rolls toward California."

-Mark Twain

"The polar bear is adaptable. If the ice goes away, I'm sure they'll survive."

- Senator Ted Stevens, R-Alaska

"Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile."

-Albert Schweitzer

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them, half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed as an industrious and enterprising citizen."

-Henry David Thoreau

"Are you aware of the beautiful sunset and the clean, salt smell of the sea?"

-Theodore Isaac Rubin

“No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.”

-Edward Abbey

"The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A perfect summer day is when the Sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken."

-James Dent

"If we are saying that the loss of species is inherently bad--I don't think we know enough about how the world works to say that."

-Craig Manson, Assistant Secretary at the Interior Department who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. (in Sierra, March-April 2004)

"If plants, including many food and forage crops, as well as natural floras, must have insects to exist, then human beings must have insects to exist."

-E. O. Wilson, forward to The Forgotten Pollinators

"I would not be satisfied to have my kids choose to be religious without trying to argue them out of it, just as I would not be satisfied to have them decide to smoke regularly or engage in any other practice I considered detrimental to mind or body."

-Isaac Asimov, "Yours, Isaac Asimov"

"Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy."

-Lewis Carroll

"The government tells us we need flood control and comes to straighten the creek in our pasture. The engineer on the job tells us the creek is now able to carry off more flood water, but in the process we lost our old willows where the cows switched flies in the noon shade, and where the owl hooted on a winter night. We lost the little marshy spot where our fringed gentians bloomed.
Some engineers are beginning to have a feeling in their bones that the meanderings of a creek not only improve the landscape but are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River."

-Aldo Leopold, Round River

"You can cut it down. You can tear out its roots. But the forest's never really gone."

-Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York , wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more."

-John Burroughs

The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,
And stared with his foot on the prey.

-Tennyson

"Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?"

-Artemus Ward

"Civilization no longer needs to open up wilderness; it needs wilderness to open up the still largely unexplored human mind."

-David Rains Wallace

"A healthy society requires the sense not of ownership but of belonging."

-Wallace Stegner

"Men have become the tools of their tools."

-Henry David Thoreau

"Trust in God, but keeping rowing to shore."

-Russian proverb

"At the core of...[the]...struggle lies longstanding tension between religiosity and modernity that makes the US exceptional among Western nations. In no other country with America's wealth and constitutional guarantees of individual liberty and regional autonomy does religion play such a central role, with 86% of people believing in miracles, 89% believing in heaven, and 73% believing in the devil and hell."

- Gary Younge in Guardian Weekly, 15-21 April 2004

"Know one thing well, and it will develop your perceptions in all areas."

-Giacomo Patri

"Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship."

-Harry S Truman

"The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it."

-Daniel Webster

"Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing."

-Redd Foxx

"The superior man is polite but not cringing; the common man is cringing but not polite."

-Confucius, Analects

"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."

-attributed to Abbie Hoffman

"All in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless..."

-Plato, Republic

"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."

-Alexander Pope

"People who drink light 'beer' don't like the taste of beer; they just like to pee a lot."

-Capital Brewery, Middleton, WI

"In many countries you remember your meals, while in other­and I think more interesting­places, your remember your illnesses."

-Paul Theroux

"The true university of these days is a collection of books."

-Thomas Carlyle

"A good conscience is the testimony of a good life and the reward of it."

-Thomas a Kempis

"Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed."

-William James

"The brain is a three pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light-years across."

-Marian C. Diamond

"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."

-Stephen Jay Gould

"The lofty oak from a small acorn grows."

-Lewis Duncombe, translation of De Minimis Maxima

"Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you."

-Mary Bly

"I hope the son-of-a-bitch who logged that is roasting in hell."

-Franklin Roosevelt, after seeing the destruction of the Olympic Peninsula in 1937 Peninsula in 1937

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

-Thomas Sowell

"Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry...For me that prayer is enough."

-Socrates

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"When British cabinet members were asked about their religious allegiances last December, following Tony Blair's official conversion to Roman Catholicism, it turned out that more than half of them are not believers. The least equivocal about their atheism were the health secretary, Alan Johnson, and the foreign secretary, David Miliband.

The fact that Miliband is an atheist is a matter of special interest given the likelihood that he may one day, and perhaps soon, occupy No. 10. In our present uncomfortable climate of quarrels between pushy religionists and resisting secularists--or attack-dog secularists and defensive religionists--which side you are on determines how you see it.  There are many reasons why it would be a great advantage to everyone to have an atheist prime minister.  

Atheist leaders are not going to think they are getting messages from Beyond telling them to go to war. They will not cloak themselves in supernaturalistic justifications, as Blair came perilously close to doing when interviewed about the decision to invade Iraq. Atheist leaders will be sceptical about the claims of religious groups to be more important than other civil society organisations in doing good, getting public funds, meriting special privileges and exemptions from laws, and having seats in the legislature and legal protection from criticism.

...Religion is a matter of choice in that, unlike race, age, gender, or disability, you can change it. True, most people's faith was driven into them when they were small children, and belief can be hard to shake off if your community will reject or hurt you for your apostasy. But it is still fundamentally voluntary. As such it should pay its own way and take its place in the queue along with everyone else. That is something that an atheist prime minister might say, and we might all breathe a great deal more easily as a result."
- There is no room for the divinity at No. 10, by AC Grayling, Guardian Weekly 29.08.08

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
-Wendell Berry, from “How To Be A Poet”

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

-Theodosius Dobzhansky

"Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?"

-Steven Wright

"All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than one lovely action."

-James Russell Lowell

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."

"Of course there's more to Science than just hurting animals, but frankly its the part I like best."

-Scientist, in "Dilbert"

"With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway about the flux."

-Bertrand Russell

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

-Thomas A. Edison

"It wasn’t worth it."

-dying words of Louis B. Mayer

"A casual stroll through lunatic asylums shows that faith does not prove anything."

-Nietzsche

"Society is a partnership…not only between those who are living, but between those who are…to be born."

-18th-century British parliamentarian and philosopher Edmund Burke

"The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining…is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors."

-Russell Kirk

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."

-Thomas H. Huxley

The tall Oak, towering to the skies,
The fury of the wind defies,
From age to age, in virtue strong.
Inured to stand, and suffer wrong.

-James Montgomery, “The Oak”

"Speak but little and well, if you would be esteemed as a man of merit."

-Trench

"What we think, we become."

-Buddha

"Verifiable knowledge makes its way slowly, and only under cultivation, but fable has burrs and feet and claws and wings and an indestructible sheath like weed-seed, and can be carried almost anywhere and take root without benefit of soil or water."

- Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

-Sinclair Lewis

"People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them."

-Dave Barry

"We have reached a point where the value we do add to our economy is now being outweighed by the value we are removing, not only from future generations in terms of diminished resources, but from ourselves in terms of unlivable cities, deadening jobs, deteriorating health, and rising crime. In biological terms, we have become a parasite and are devouring our host."

-Paul Hawken

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

-Albert Einstein, What I Believe, 1930

"What happens if you get scared half to death twice?"

"Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

-Franz Kafka

"All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem."

-Martin Luther King, Jr., 'Strength to Love,' 1963

"Why is it that conservation is so rarely practiced by those who must extract a living from the land? It is said to boil down, in the last analysis, to economic obstacles. Take forestry as an example: the lumberman says he will crop his timber when stumpage values rise high enough, and when wood substitutes quit underselling him. He said this decades ago. In the interim, stumpage values have gone down, not up; substitutes have increased, not decreased. Forest devastation goes on as before. I admit the reality of this predicament. I suspect that the forces inherent in unguided economic evolution are not all beneficent. Like the forces inside our own bodies, they may become malignant, pathogenic. I believe that many of the economic forces inside the modern body-politic are pathogenic in respect to harmony with land."

-Aldo Leopold, Round River

"Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

-Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Civil Rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963

"We have spent the prime of our lives in procuring [for the youth of America] the blessing of liberty. Let them spend their lives in showing that it [freedom] is the great parent of science and of virtue; and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free."

"Way back in the days when the grass was still green
and the pond was still wet
and the clouds were still clean,
and the song of the Swomee-Swans rang out in space ...
one morning, I came to this glorious place.
And I first saw the trees!"

-Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

"Write on your hearts that every day is the best day of the year."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It's no exaggeration to say that the undecided could go one way or another."

A flower falls,
even though we love it,
and a weed grows
even though we do not love it.

-Dogen, Japanese Buddhist monk and philosopher (1200-1253)

"Every increased possession loads us with new weariness."

-John Ruskin

"The founding fathers were great thinkers. How did their project degenerate into George Bush and Sarah Palin?"

-George Monbiot, Guardian Weekly 07.11.08

"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure of life."

-dying words of Charles Frohman, 1915

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."

-Alice Walker, The Color Purple

"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."

-Walt Whitman

"Everything is water."

-Thales of Miletus

"And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him."

-Jack London, The Call of the Wild

"Somewhere along the scale from bacteria to humans, we have to decide where killing becomes murder, and where eating becomes cannibalism."

-Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee

"I might be in the basement. I'll go upstairs and check."

-M. C. Escher

"May you live all the days of your life."

-Jonathon Swift

"I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are."

-a fourth grader in San Diego, from Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv

When I see birches bend to left and right…
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

-Robert Frost

Here is the vast, savage, howling mother of ours,
Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children,
as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned
from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively
An interaction of man on man.

-Henry David Thoreau

"There's a lot of different ways to look at weeds and it's really more a set of characteristics in order to define what a weed is. Generally it's a plant that grows in an area that has a lot of disturbance caused by humans. Plants that are fast growing that reproduce really quick and they just thrive in areas where other plants wouldn't."
Rick studies plants which have medicinal value. And it turns out a lot of them can be classified as "weeds".
"There's about 101 plant species that are used for pharmaceuticals. Of those about one third that are pharmaceuticals actually come from weeds. Well if you look at the total world's flora only about 3 percent of all plant species are considered weeds. So the fact that one third of all plants that are used for pharmaceuticals are weeds means it's about an order of magnitude higher then what we'd expect."
"Weeds generally have negative connotations because they're growing in areas where people don't want them to be and because they do grow relatively fast and invade where other plants are trying to grow. People don't like to see them in yards and gardens and areas like that. However, a lot of these plants for the very reason that they're so fast and thrive in disturbed areas are the same reasons that they have bioactive compounds that might be useful as medicinals."

-Rick Stepp, an assistant professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, heard on NPR's Pulse of the Planet

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

-Jack Handey

"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."

-Harry S. Truman

"Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful."

-Buddha

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see everything as it truly is, infinite."

-William Blake, Essays

"What hidden meaning in this riddle lies?"

-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust

Holidays should always be like this,
free from over-emphasis,
time for soul to stretch and spit
before the world comes back on it.

-Louis MacNeice, Epilogue for W.H. Auden

"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more."

-John Burroughs

"I bet I can live to a hundred if only I can get outdoors again."

-Geraldine Page as Carrie Watts, in The Trip to Bountiful

"He knows nothing, and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."

-George Bernard Shaw

"The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet."

-John F. Kennedy

"It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned out in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world’s heart, something demonic and no longer planned—escaped it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant’s game against its master."

-Loren Eiseley

"From wonder into wonder existence opens."

-Lao-tzu

"The Earth isn’t dying, it’s being killed, and the people who are doing it have names and addresses."

-Earth First

"ars est celare artem"

"it is art to conceal art"

"There are moments when art almost attains the dignity of manual labor."

-Oscar Wilde

"Like most I exploit what it gives and I do with it what I please....Nature to me is like my house or even like my cluttered room. It has things in it which can be played with. I say play away, do what you want with it, it's your house."

-a young man from Potomac, Maryland; from Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv

"Place is what takes me out of myself, out of the limited scope of human activity, but this is not misanthropic. A sense of place is a way of embracing humanity among all of its neighbors. It is an entry into the larger world."

-Robert Michael Pyle

"So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months."

-Edward O. Wilson

"Children live through their senses. Sensory experiences link the child’s exterior world with their interior, hidden, affective world. Since the natural environment is the principal source of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life…."

-Robin Moore, director of the National Learning Initiative

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."

-John Lehman

-Jim LeCuyer

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We are the children of the earth and removed from her our spirit withers."

-George MacCaulay Trevelyan

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically."

-Isaac Asimov

"In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist."

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

-Albert Camus

"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."

-David Brin

"I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some."

-Herbert Rappaport

In man’s most dark extremity
Oft succor dawns from Heaven.

-Walter Scott, The Lord of the Isles (canto I, st. 20)

"Fears in modern-city dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us. We ought to be afraid of guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighter fluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs, not of snakes and spiders. Public safety officials try to strike fear in the hearts of citizens using everything from statistics to shocking photographs, usually to no avail. Parents scream and punish to deter their children from playing with matches or chasing a ball into the street, but when Chicago schoolchildren were asked what they were most afraid of, they cited lions, tigers and snakes, unlikely hazards in the Windy City."

-Stephen Pinker, "How The Mind Works"

"Thank God for the things I do not own."

-Teresa de Avila

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is not more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one."

-George Bernard Shaw

"In childhood and boyhood this ecstasy overtook me when I was happy out of doors...A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember...that I climbed up a stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one. Surely most children are like that."

-Bernard Berenson

"You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play."

-Warren Beatty

"I played around our yard some and talked to the fence posts, sung songs and made the weeds sing..."

-Woody Guthrie

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover;
and the song of the phoebe bird,
And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter;
and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf, …

-Walt Whitman

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."

-Goethe

"It's a beautiful night...you can almost see the stars."

- J. Frank Parnell, Repo Man

"The core of the naturalist intelligence is the human ability to recognize plants, animals, and other parts of the natural environment, like clouds or rocks. All of us can do this; some kids (experts on dinosaurs) and many adults (hunters, botanists, anatomists) excel at this pursuit. While the ability doubtless evolved to deal with natural kinds of elements, I believe that it has been hijacked to deal with the world of man-made objects. We are good at distinguishing among cars, sneakers, and jewelry, for example, because our ancestors needed to be able to recognize carnivorous animals, poisonous snakes, and flavorful mushrooms."

-Howard Gardner, Harvard University

"What happened, what we think happened in distant memory, is built around a small collection of dominating images. In one of my own from the age of seven, I stand in the shallows of Paradise Beach, staring down at a huge jellyfish in water so still and clear that its every detail is revealed as though it were trapped in glass."

-Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure;
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

-William Wordsworth

"The mountain says you live in a particular place. Though it’s a small area, just a square mile or two, it took me many trips to even start to learn its secrets. Here there are blueberries, and here there are bigger blueberries… You pass a hundred different plants along the trail—I know maybe twenty of them. One could spend a lifetime learning a small range of mountains, and once upon a time people did."

-Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

"Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses."

-Adlai Stevenson

"I spent, as you know, a year and a half in a clergyman's family and heard almost every Tuesday the very best, most earnest and most impressive preacher it has ever been my fortune to meet with, but it produced no effect whatever on my mind."

-Alfred Russel Wallace

“Today, I am convinced more than ever that this is the time and that we are the ones we have been waiting for-generations of conscious beings from all walks of life with the courage, communications, and know how to change the world for the better. We are the Architects of A New Dawn and this is what we came here to do."

-Carlos Santana

"Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.
I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead."

-Louisa May Alcott

"This we know: All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth, Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand on it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself."

-Chief Seattle

"Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics…would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher."

-Franz Karl Achard (1753-1821)

"When asked about the word ‘hike’ John Muir replied, “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter not hike.” When Christians, making a pilgrimage during the middle ages, were asked where they were going they would  reply ‘A la sainte terre’,  ‘To the Holy Land.’  They became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers.  Muir seldom hurried. He would stop to get acquainted with individual trees. He would hail people passing by and make them get down on hands and knees if necessary to examine some tiny seedling or to see the beauty of some little bed of almost microscopic flowers.
The goal is not to be the first to the trails end, it is to experience the trail."

-excerpt from The Mountain Trail and Its Message, Albert W. Palmer, 1911

"When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive."

-Carl Sagan, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors"

"[...] Montague Stevens saw only the surface of the land he hunted over. His active days afield coincided with the advent of erosion in the cow country, but he did not see it. The better to keep up with his hounds, he practiced riding his horse across the cavernous arroyos which were then invading the fertile valleys, but he did not recognize the invasion as something new in history, nor did he perceive its cause: the terrific overgrazing practiced by the early cowmen. Small wonder, then, that less intelligent men still fail to perceive that something more important than bears is departing from the western range. New Mexico's grizzlies succumbed visibly to trap, gun, and poisoned bait, but New Mexico's fertile valleys slipped down the Rio Grande in the night. Neither will return."

-Aldo Leopold, Review of "Meet Mr. Grizzly", Journal of Forestry, March 1944

"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm."

-NASA scientist James Hansen

"For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise."

-Benjamin Franklin

"It must be for truth’s sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature."

-Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873)

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

-Martin Luther King, Jr., speech at Civil Rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963

The Republicans spent your Social Security on their war
"Yeehaw" is not a foreign policy
The Patriot Act - protecting your rights by taking them away
Bush deserves a third term:  prison
Slapping a yellow ribbon on the back of your gas-guzzling SUV during a war for oil makes you look like an asshole
They won't stop lying as long as you're still believing them
Be nice to America - or we'll bring democracy to your country
September 11, 2001 - 15 Saudis, 0 Iraqis
Try being informed instead of just opinionated
Stop using Jesus as an excuse for being a narrow-minded, bigoted dick

-bumpersticker relics from the former administration

"Recently…a great nature study movement has sprung up amongst us and in this movement the study of insects must play an important part….Subjects for observation are never lacking, and , although some prejudice exists against them as insignificant crawling creatures and in large part nuisances and pests from a human standpoint, yet their structure is wonderful, their life histories are most interesting, and among them may be found a wealth of material for the study of broad life problems of the utmost biographical importance."

-L. O. Howard, 1901

"Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us."

-Edgar Douglas Adrian

"It was another glad awakening to fresh breezes, vast expanses of level greensward, bright sunlight, and impressive solitude utterly without visible human beings or human habitations, and an atmosphere of such amazing magnifying properties that trees that seemed close at hand were more than three miles away."

-Mark Twain, Roughing It

"Let China sleep, for when she wakes the world will shake."

-Napoleon

"The universe must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it."

-Brandon Carter, physicist, quoted by Henry Simmons, Mosaic, Fall 1990

"Adaptations are for the good of the genes that implement them, and one of the best demonstrations of this is the 50-50 ratio of males to females. If organisms were designed to benefit the species, they would not waste half the available food on sons, who can't directly replenish the species with babies. Any necessary genetic variation could easily be supplied by a few studs. Organisms pump out sons because whenever females are more plentiful, the genes of mothers and fathers who bear sons have a reproductive field day, and the mixture settles at 50-50. If the species suffers, that's just too bad."

-Stephen Pinker

"Without wilderness, the world's a cage."

-David Brower

"If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon his creation, I should have recommended something simpler."

-a response attributed to Alfonso X (1221-1284 AD), King of Leon and Castile, on having the Ptolemaic system of astronomy explained to him

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated."

-Paul Alderson

"Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be."

-Rita Rudner

"Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it."

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditation

"The dangers of life are infinite, and safety is among them."

-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Essays

"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."

-William Beebe, 1906

“Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.”

-C. G. Jung

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”

-George Bernard Shaw

"What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse."

-Edward Abbey

"My garden, also, what little time I can be at Tuskegee, is another source of rest and enjoyment. Somehow I like, as often as possible, to touch nature, not something that is artificial or an imitation, but the real thing. When I can leave my office in time so that I can spend thirty or forty minutes in spading the ground, in planting seeds, in digging about the plants, I feel that I am coming into contact with something that is giving me strength for the many duties and hard places that await me out in the big world. I pity the man or woman who has never learned to enjoy nature and to get strength and inspiration out of it."

-Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery

"I sometimes think that general and popular Treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work."

-Charles Darwin, in a letter to Thomas Henry Huxley

"It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf."

-H. L. Mencken

"Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution."

-Edward O. Wilson

There is one thing certain. The man
who attempts to work among bees with
his breath tainted with whisky, or alcohol
in any form, will be very apt to learn
the bees are prohibitionists.

- Sioux County Herald, September 13, 1888

“The city would never be so young again, or so bright, so fun loving, so full of self-confidence. The lights were going out all over Europe, and the rest of the world was fearful of being drawn into a raging war, but in brash San Francisco, all was brightness, music, and dancing across the hills."

-Herb Caen, forward to San Francisco Invites the World

"Come my beloved, let us go to the fields. If the pomegranate trees are in flower then I shall give you the gift of my Love."

-Song of Songs: 7:12

"Science is simply commonsense at its best ­that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."

-Thomas Huxley

"A world without rodents would be a very different world. It is less likely to come to pass than a world dominated by rodents and free of people. If nuclear war destroys humanity and most of the rest of life, a good bet for survival in the short term, and for evolutionary ancestry in the long term, is rats. I have a post-Armageddon vision. We and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. They gnaw their way through New York, London and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses and turning them into new generations of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the cities and into the countryside. When all the relics of human profligacy are eaten, populations crash again, and the rodents turn on each other, and on the cockroaches scavenging with them. In a period of intense competition, short generations perhaps with radioactivity enhanced mutation-rates boost rapid evolution. With human ships and planes gone, islands become islands again, with local populations isolated save for occasional lucky raftings: ideal conditions for evolutionary divergence. Within 5 million years, a whole range of new species replace the ones we know. Herds of giant grazing rats are stalked by sabre-toothed predatory rats. Given enough time, will a species of intelligent, cultivated rats emerge? Will rodent historians and scientists eventually organise careful archaeological digs (gnaws?) through the strata of our long-compacted cities, and reconstruct the peculiar and temporarily tragic circumstances that gave ratkind its big break."

-Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

"All the plants of a given country are at war with one another."

-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

"In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better."

-Ellen DeGeneres

“A cobweb in the attic gathers dust, and it is ugly. But a cobweb in the outdoors gathers dewdrops that scintillate in the sun. Get out. Find your hope. Read the Earth. It is an extraordinary book: full color, stereo sound, wonderful aromas, the win. It is an extraordinary planet.”

-David Brower and Steve Chapple, Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run

"To write honestly and with conviction anything about the migration of birds, one should oneself have migrated. Somehow or other we should dehumanize ourselves, feel the feel of feathers on our body and wind in our wings, and finally know what it is to leave abundance and safety and daylight and yield to a compelling instinct, age-old, seeming at the time quite devoid of reason and object."  

-William Beebe, American naturalist

"Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be."

-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

"Most scientists today began their careers as children, chasing bugs and snakes, collecting spiders, and feeling awe in the presence of nature. Since such untidy activities are fast disappearing, how, then, will our future scientists learn about nature?"

-Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

"Invasive species issues are the most important issues in the universe. The known universe--there may be something big going on in Alpha Centauri we haven't figured out, but...It took 257 million years for us to evolve five continents' worth of diversity. It will take a few hundred years to lose that. If we fail to act, we're going to have one continent's worth of diversity. Forever."

"Thirteen years after the legendary confrontation over the theory of evolution between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce ('Soapy Sam') and Thomas Henry Huxley ('Darwin's bulldog'), Wilberforce died in 1873 in an equestrian fall. Huxley quipped to physicist John Tyndall, 'For once, reality and his brain came into contact and the result was fatal.'"

-from Skeptic column in Scientific American, August 2006

"‘Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum opus of my latter years!’ He picked up the volume from the table and read out the whole title, Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. ‘Alone I did it. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.’"

-Sherlock Holmes, “His Last Bow”

"We’ll work on anything without a backbone—except politicians."

-Scott Hoffman Black, director of the Xerces Society

"But despite all the recent advances in basic research and its practical achievements, American science—and the funding for it—is lagging.
The public’s understanding of science as the key to a productive and healthy future remains woefully limited, and our public schools, with slashed budgets, have been facing critical shortages of science teachers, science labs and lab tools."

-David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle, February 3, 2009

“Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.”

-Edward Abbey, The Hidden Canyon:  A River Journey

"Nature has been taken over by thugs who care absolutely nothing about it. We need to take nature back."

-Rasheed Salahuddin

"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."

-E. B. White

"San Diego County, larger in size and population than some states, is an ecological and sociological microcosm of America. It is, in fact, a place with more endangered and threatened species than any other county in the continental United States. The United Nations declared it on of the Earth’s twenty-five “hot spots” of biodiversity. Yet, as of this writing, not one of the forty-three school districts within this county offers a single elective course in local flora and fauna."

-Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

Magna opera Domini exquisite in omnes voluntates eius.
The works of the Lord are great; sought out of all those that have pleasure therein.

-Over the entrance to the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge

"Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race."

-H. L. Mencken

I'm going, I'm going, where the water tastes like wine,
We can jump in the water, stay drunk all the time.

Canned Heat, "Going Up The Country"

“Sic nos bees planto mellis, tamen non pro ourselves.”
“So we the bees make honey, but not for ourselves.”

-woodcut, late 1600‘s

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: 
Come see my shining palace built upon the sand!

-Edna St Vincent Millay, "Second Fig"

"When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes."

-Wystan Hugh Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1965)

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."

-Oscar Wilde

“You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.”

-George Bernard Shaw

"A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation. Elephants, for instance. Once molecules have learnt to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming around the countryside…Some of the things resembling elephants will be men."

-Peter William Atkins, The Creation (1981)

"What does not benefit the hive is no benefit to the bee."

Antoninus Marcus Aurelius

"He who gets a name for early rising can stay in bed until midday."

-Irish Proverb

"Whiskey was invented so the Irish wouldn't rule the world."

-anon.

“I'm actually certain that we're in the midst of a mass extinction. Geologically, there have been five periods in which upwards of 20 percent of the Earth's species, in one case maybe 90 percent of the Earth's species, went extinct, and there've been about 20 or so others in which anywhere from two to 10 percent of species have gone extinct. And certainly over the last few hundred years there are enough extinctions to qualify us in the second category. There's documentary evidence, in some cases, for this.
And it's an ongoing process. It's not slowing down -- if anything, it appears to be accelerating. So I think it's quite possible that we'll eventually be in a situation that qualifies as one of the great mass extinctions.”

-Daniel Simberloff, professor of environmental studies and director of the Institute for Biological Invasions at the University of Tennessee

"Consider, for example, the question of "accessibility." An area that cannot be reached is obviously not being put to use. On the other hand, one reached too easily becomes a mere "resort" to which people flock for purposes just as well served by golf courses, swimming pools, and summer hotels. Parks are often described as "recreation areas" and so they are. But the term "recreation" as ordinarily used does not imply much stress upon the kind of experience which Grand Canyon, despite the flood of visitors that comes to it, still does provide:  namely, the experience of being in the presence of nature's ways and nature's work."

-Joseph Wood Krutch, What Men? What Needs?

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: 
Come see my shining palace built upon the sand!

-Edna St Vincent Millay, Second Fig

"I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do."

-Kurt Vonnegut

"You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

-Wallace Stegner, From Thoughts in a Dry Land (1972)

"It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value."

-Steven Hawking

"God gave us a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time."

-Robin Williams

"The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit."

-Joseph Wood Krutch, Today and All Its Yesterdays, 1958

"All other things have a portion of everything, but Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing but is all alone by itself."

-Anaxagoras, Greek natural philosopher (c.500-428 BC)

"Reality is just a crutch for people who can’t deal with drugs."

-Lily Tomlin

"Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character. It is aridity that gives the air its special dry clarity; aridity that puts brilliance in the light and polishes and enlarges the stars; aridity that leads grasses to evolve as bunches rather than as turf, aridity that exposes the pigmentation of the earth and limits, almost eliminates the color of chlorophyll...To eyes trained on universal chlorophyll, gold or brown hills may look repulsive. Sagebrush is an acquired taste, as are raw earth and alkali flats...You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns..."

-Wallace Stegner

"Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighboring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star."

-Francis William Aston, “Mass Spectra and Isotopes”, Nobel lecture, 12 December 1922

‘Every moment dies a man,/ Every moment one is born’
I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:
‘Every moment dies a man / And one and a sixteenth is born.’ I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.

-Charles Babbage, unpublished letter to Tennyson in response to his “Vision of Sin” (1842)

"The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers."

-Martin Luther King Jr., 'Strength to Love,' 1963

"Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either--so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day."

-editorial in Scientific American, April 2005

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dream. Wandering by lone sea breakers, and sitting by desolate streams. World losers and world forsakers, for whom the pale moon gleams. Yet we are movers and the shakers of the world forever it seems."  

-Arthur C. Coxe

"Deserve your dream."

-Octavio Paz

"He loved maps, and in his hall there hung a large one of the Country Round with all his favorite walks marked on it in red ink."

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

For glad spring has begun,
And to the ardent sun
The earth, long time so bleak,
Turns a frost-bitten cheek.

-Celia Thaxter

“One day if I go to heaven...I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’”

-Herb Caen

"Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars."

-Henry Van Dyke

"What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected; they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

-Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

"The machine has divorced man from the world of nature to which he belongs, and in the process he has lost in large measure the powers of contemplation with which he was endowed.  A prerequisite for the preservation of the canons of humanism is a reestablishment of organic roots with our natural environment and, related to it, the evolution of ways of life which encourage contemplation and the search for truth and knowledge. The flower and vegetable garden, green grass, the fireplace, the primeval forest with its wondrous assemblage of living things, the uninhabited hilltop where one can silently look at the stars and wonder—all of these things and many others are necessary for the fulfillment of man’s psychological and spiritual needs. To be sure, they are of no “practical value” and are seemingly unrelated to man’s pressing need for food and living space.
But they are as necessary to the preservation of humanism as food is necessary to the preservation of human life."

-Harrison Brown

"Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!"

-Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

"Something in us that requires the gladdening of spring in order to cheerfully accommodate the quiet of our rainless California summers."

-Judith Larner Lowery, Gardening With a Wild Heart

We’re made so, that we love
First, when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see

-Fra Lippo Lippi

"If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us."

-AA Gill, "The London Times"

"The evolution of the universe as a whole has no end, and it may have had no beginning."

-Andrei Linde, physicist, Inflation and Quantum Cosmology, 1990

"Don't expect me to do the right thing, make me do it."

-Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt

"One merges in another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknownable...."

-John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's kiss glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze.

-Julian Grenfell

"Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art."

-Izaak Walton

"Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself."

-Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Our Vanishing Night," National Geographic

"Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."

-Michael Crichton

“To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war.  We will have regional conflicts and use of force, but world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer.  But the environment, that is a creeping danger.  I’m more worried about global warming than I am about any major military conflict.”

-Hans Blix, head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission, 12 March 2003

"If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature; and the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature. Nature we have always with us, an inexhaustible storehouse of that which moves the heart, appeals to the mind, and fires the imagination‹health to the body, a stimulus to the intellect, and joy to the soul."

-John Burroughs (1837­1921), American writer and naturalist

"The wonders of the sea are as marvelous as the glories of the heavens. Among the revelations which scientific research has lately made, none are more interesting to the student of nature, or more suggestive to the Christian philosopher, than those which relate to the bed of the ocean."

-Matthew Fontaine Maury, Physical Geography of the Sea, 1858

"Ant workers are the chief predators of insects and spiders. They form the cemetery squads of creatures their own size, collecting over 90 percent of the dead bodies to carry back to their nests. By transporting seeds for food and discarding some of them uneaten in and around the nests, they are responsible for the dispersal of large numbers of plant species. They move more soil than earthworms, and in the process circulate vast quantities of nutrients vital to the health of the land ecosystems."

-Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants

"We are each made more healthy - physically and psychologically - by regular contact with wild animals, plants, and landscapes."

-Allen Fish, Director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory

"It is always distressing when outraged morality does not possess the strength of arm to administer direct chastisement on the sinner."

-W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

"Most of us need to be humbled more often, to be reminded that nature is not only more complex than we think, it is more complex than we can think."

-Gary Paul Nabhan

My papa says that I was blest
For if that music found me,
I'd be witch-cast like all the rest.
This town grows old around me.
I cannot say I did not hear
That sound so haunting hollow--
I heard, I heard, I heard it clear...
I was afraid to follow.

-Shel Silverstein

"Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

-Don Marquis

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

-William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

"[What is the] extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?"

-Robert Michael Pyle

"I am the grass; I cover all"

-Carl Sandburg, “Grass”

God Bless the grass
That grows through the crack
They roll the concrete over it
To try and keep it back
The concrete gets tired
Of what it has to do
It breaks and it buckles
And the grass grows through.
God bless the grass

-Malvina Reynolds (1900-1978), from her song God Bless the Grass

"The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information."

-Edward Abbey

The well rising without sound,
the spring on a hillside,
the plowshare brimming through the deep ground
everywhere in the field —

The sharp swallows in their swerve
flaring and hesitating
hunting for the final curve
coming closer and closer —

The swallow heart from wing beat to wing beat
counseling decision, decision:
thunderous examples. I place my feet
with care in such a world.

-William Stafford, 'The Well Rising'

"It is always sunrise somewhere..."

-John Muir

The earth is waking at the voice of May,
The new grass brightens by the trodden way,
The woods wave welcome to the sweet spring day,
And the sea is growing summer blue.

-Elizabeth A. Allen

"For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master? Let no man expect that one lone government bureau is able‹even tho it be willing‹to thrash out this question alone....Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us."

-Aldo Leopold, 1925

"Wildness is a fragile thing. Man can break it, but not make it. And we are quite capable, in our own time, of using up all the choices America will ever have between saving and spending what is left of its unmarred natural heritage..."

"It is not down on any map, true places never are."

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Other animals do not need a purpose in life...the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"

-John Gray

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

-Carl Sagan

"But what pleasure it is to know that there is back county for them to retreat to, that nobody is going to push roads through that wilderness, that no RVs or trail bikes or tote goats will roar through those forests and stink up that clean air. The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls' good, but leave no tracks."

-Wallace Stegner, Crossing Into Eden, 1989

"If we are saying that the loss of species is inherently bad-I don't think we know enough about how the world works to say that."

-Craig Manson, former assistant secretary at the Interior Department who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. (in Sierra, March-April 2004)

"How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas."

-Edward Abbey

"He that lives upon hope will die fasting."

-Benjamin Franklin

Talent is nurtured aye in solitude,
But character amid the tempests of the world.

-Goethe

"If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark."

-St. John of the Cross

"Love: A temporary insanity cured by marriage."

-Ambrose Bierce

"To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful."

-Robert A. Heinlein

"There grewe an aged tree on the greene; A goodly Oake sometime had it bene, With armes full strong and largely displayed, But of their leaves they were disarayde The bodie bigge, and mightely pight, Thoroughly rooted, and of wond'rous hight; Whilome had bene the king of the field, And mochell mast to the husband did yielde, And with his nuts larded many swine: But now the gray mosse marred his rine; His bared boughes were beaten with stormes, His toppe was bald, and wasted with wormes, His honour decayed, his brauches sere."

"Nobody sees a flower, really. It is so small it takes time­we haven't time­and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."

-Georgia O'Keeffe

"We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us."

“With a resolute whisper, Lobos Creek flowed past our home on its mile-long journey to the ocean. It was bordered, at times covered, with watercress and alive with minnows, tadpoles, and a variety of larvae. Water bugs skimmed the open surfaces and dragonflies darted above the streambed. In spring, flowers were rampant and fragrant. In heavy fog the creek was eerie, rippling out of nowhere and vanishing into nothingness.”

-from Ansel Adams’ 1985 autobiography. Adams grew up near Lobos Creek in the early 1900s.

"If A Tree Falls In The Forest, And No One Is Around To Hear It, Does Climate Change?"

-anon.

“With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward, and surround plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom. We know what is really out there only from the animal’s gaze; for we take the very young child and force it around, so that it sees objects—not the Open, which is so deep in animals’ faces. Free from death. We, only, can see death; the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain.
Never, not for a single day, do we have before us that pure space into which flowers endlessly open. Always there is World and never Nowhere without the No: that pure unseparated element which one breathes without desire and endlessly knows….And we: spectators, always, everywhere, turned toward the world of objects, never outward. It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy”

Where you tend a rose, my lad,
A thistle cannot grow.

-Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

"...Firefighting's dominance over the Forest Service became apparent in 2008 as its share of the Forest Service's budget crept to almost 50 %. That's up from 17 % only 15 years ago. Firefighting costs are a cancer eating away at the Forest Service, robbing dollars from campground and trail maintenance, stream restoration, wildlife protection and every other Forest Service program. Some members of Congress wanted to solve the firefighting problem in 2008 by throwing yet more money at it. The aptly named FLAME Act (Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act), apparently patterned after the Wall Street bail-out, proposed creation of a new slush fund that would guarantee the Forest Service unlimited access to tax dollars for firefighting purposes. This ill-conceived bill died in the Senate in 2008, only to be reintroduced early in 2009 as the Forest Service and some western state legislators seek to use the Forest Service's war on fire to justify unlimited federal spending to protect a few remote trophy homes."

-excerpt from 2008 Annual Report of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics

"The smallest, simplest free-living cell plays a critical role in the cycling of oceanic carbon, a part that is only now becoming clear. The sheer abundance of Pelagibacter ubique means the bacterium is a major consumer of the organic carbon in the oceans, which nearly equals the amount of carbon dioxide in the entire atmosphere. As the bug consumes the dissolved carbon, it produces nutrients required by algae for growth; the algae then convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Ocean algae are responsible for producing about half the photosynthetic oxygen on the planet."

-Scientific American, December 2005

"If we do not begin to preserve them (native wildflowers), the time will come when they will become extinct and live only in history."

-Theodore Payne, 1916

"Beyond a critical point in a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive."

-Frank Herbert, Dune

"Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware."

-Martin Buber

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."

-Andre Malraux (1901-1976)

"Our children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens."

-Wendell Berry

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect.

Enough of science and of art:
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

-Wordsworth

The careful insect midst his works I view,
Now from the flowers exhaust the fragrant dew,
With golden treasures load his little thighs,
And steer his distant journey through the skies.

-John Gay

"Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club."

-Thomas H. Huxley

"Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them."

-Victoria Glendinning

"Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another."

-Juvenal

"The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists."

-Arthur Schnabel

"But nature -that is, biological evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, ... he has a rather crude survival kit; and yet -this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments. Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it."

-Jacob Bronowski

"As long as men are free to ask what they must; free to say what they think; free to think what they will; freedom can never be lost and science can never regress."

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Each succeeding generation of biologists has markedly different expectations of what is natural, because they study increasingly altered systems that bear less and less resemblance to the former, preexploitation versions."

-Paul Dayton in "Science" 1998

"The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakspeare [sic]…Wordsworth…Keats…Chateaubriand…Senancour."

-Mathew Arnold (1865)

"The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds -- how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives -- and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!"

-John Burroughs

"One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person."

-William Feather

Our father which art in heaven
Stay there
And we will stay on earth
Which is sometimes so pretty.

-Jacques Prevert

"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."

-C. S. Lewis

Life may be short, but it is also wide.

-anon.

"Today’s children, growing up on lawns and pavements, will not even have nostalgia to guide them, and soon the animals will not only be missing, but forgotten."

-Sara Stein, Noah’s Garden

"We can do as much as we can to prevent them, but the reality is we will always have oil spills."

-Steve Edinger, Office of Oil Spill Prevention and Response

"Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity."

-Aldo Leopold

"Butterflies are self propelled flowers."

-R. H. Heinlein

"The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same."

-Carlos Castaneda

"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?"

-Ernest Gaines

Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

-Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), The New Scientific Spirit (1934)

"The wild creatures I had come to Africa to see are exhilarating in their multitudes and colors, and I imagined for a time that this glimpse of the earth’s morning might account for the anticipation that I felt, the sense of origins, of innocence and mystery, like a marvelous childhood faculty restored."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born

"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."

-Bertrand Russell

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does."

-John Kenneth Galbraith, Foreword to Gloria Steinem, The Beach Book (1963)

"Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us."

-Wallace Stegner, 1969, Conservation Equals Survival

"Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society."

-Benjamin Franklin

"The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind."

-Humphrey Bogart

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."

-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

"In the relation of man with the animals, with the flowers, with the objects of creation, there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break forth into light and which will be the corollary and complement to human ethics."

-Victor Hugo

"Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators."

-Richard Dawkins

"They have poisoned the Thames and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks....I almost think it is the destiny of science to exterminate the human race."

-Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange, 1860

"Who will speak for Planet Earth?"

"Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations."

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring, it was peace."

-Milan Kundera

"I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended for us to forego their use."

-Galileo

"It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true."

-Bertrand Russell

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it."

-Mark Twain

"Summer afternoon-summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

-Henry James

"Let Nature be your teacher."

-William Wordsworth

I read about the evils of drinking so I gave up on reading.

-Henny Youngman

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."

-John Muir

It is not the language of painters
but the language of nature which one should listen to….
The feeling for the things themselves,
for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

-Vincent Van Gogh

"Do not cease to drink beer, to eat, to intoxicate thyself, to make love, and to celebrate the good days."

-Ancient Egyptian Credo

"There are many other (besides testosterone) behaviour-eliciting hormones fundamental for humen well-being, including estrogen and progesterone in females. The fact that complex behavioural patterns can be triggered by a tiny concentration of moleculas coursing through the bloodstream, and that different animals of the same species generate different amounts of these hormones, is something worth thinking about when it's time to judge such matters as free will, individual responsibility, and law and order."

-Carl Sagan, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors"

"Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in a lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much."

-Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991

"All things are difficult before they are easy."

-Dr. Thomas Fuller

"A man’s life should be as fresh as a river. It should be the same channel but a new water every instant."

-Thoreau

"The most effective way to connect our children to nature is to connect ourselves to nature….If children sense genuine adult enthusiasm, they’ll want to emulate that interest—even if, when they’re teenagers, they pretend to lose it."

-Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening but this wasn't it."

"We protect the spineless. We see ourselves as equal opportunity -anything without a backbone."

-Xerces Society motto

"They who drink beer will think beer."

-Washington Irving

"France has culture but no civilization. England has civilization but no culture. The United States has neither. Canada has both."

-Robin Mathews

"Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. And after I've finished "shooting," my unharmed victims are still around for others to enjoy. I have developed a deep respect for animals. I consider them fellow living creatures with certain rights that should not be violated any more than those of humans."

-Jimmy Stewart

"You are what you eat, so why be a vegetable. Eat someone stronger and more good looking than you are."

-The Swami from Miami

"The sojourning habit of the people [here]... is shown in their want of interest in the fixed qualities of the place. Nobody knows what the trees and plants are."

-Frederick Law Olmsted

“He respects Owl, because you can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right.”

-A. A. Milne

"The physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms."

-George Wald

“Alone and warming his five wits, the white owl in the belfry sits.”

-Tennyson

"My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived in the United States in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under the English law at the time."

-Garrison Keillor

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."

-Rachel Louise Carson

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower,
The moping owl does to the moon complain.

"You reached for that honey pot, and you got stung."

-Harold A. Ackerman

"The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function."

-Edward Teller

"Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives."

-Thomas Berry

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane"

-Kilgore Trout

"Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!"

-Matt Frewer

Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1 bananosecond.

-anon.

The ants toil for no Master
Sufficient to their Need
The daily commerce of the Nest
The storage of their Seed
They meet-and exchange Messages-
But none to none-bows down
They-like God's thoughts-speak each to each-
Without-external-crown.

- A. S. Byatt, Possession

The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;
The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind.

-Ryokan

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles."

-Anne Frank

"Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or thought of the course of nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything."

-Francis Bacon

"The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."

-Mark Twain

"Science can lead to truth; only the imagination can lead you towards meaning."

-C. S. Lewis

"The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel."

-Charles Darwin

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there."

-E. H. Gombrich

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."

-Alfred Lord Tennyson

"You don't get anything clean without getting something else dirty."

-Cecil Baxter

"I bought some batteries, but they weren't included."

-Steven Wright

"[Nature] is the only place where miracles not only happen, but happen all the time."

-Thomas Wolfe

"Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future."

-Wallace Stegner

"All through Autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call “aware”—an almost untranslatable word meaning something like “beauty tinged with sadness.” Some days we have to shoulder against a marauding melancholy."

-Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

"Many thanks for sending me the book Biology of the Striped Skunk…Frankly, I doubt whether I shall read it or not, unless I happen to have some intimate contact with a skunk which may induce me to learn more about him."

-Roger Adams, undated letter to a member of the Natural History Survey

"… we have not merely escaped from something but also into something…we have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of man alone but of everything which shares with us the great adventure of being alive."

-Joseph Wood Krutch

"The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are…"

-Mathew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867)

"I have come across among the scientists and curators that the right way to die is slumped in front of the microscope at an extremely old age. In the right hand the quill pen will just have scratched out the last description of a huge and complex group of organisms. The old boy or girl will have a vague smile upon that wrinkled but deeply distinguished face: a job well done."

-Richard Fortey, Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

Colorado Stratification
Layer by layer
History revealed--
Hungry river writes exposé!

-Ernest A. Peterson

"1977's Empire of the Ants acknowledges the human susceptibility to pheromonic influence:  "Giant ants...use pheromones to enslave the local human population and to compel the humans to operate a sugar factory for them."  In Florida, this same phenomenon is called agribusiness."

-Steve Mirsky in Scientific American, October 2004

"Both science and art are primarily spiritual activities, whatever practical applications may be derived from their results. Disorder, lack of meaning, are spiritual not physical discomforts, order and sense spiritual not physical satisfactions."

-Wystan Hugh Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1965)

"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things."

-Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

"The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a machine."

-Sir James Jeans (1877-1946)

“’Hello, Rabbit,’ he said. ‘Is that you?’
‘Let’s pretend it isn’t,’ said Rabbit, ‘and see what happens.’”

-A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh