Health is the capacity of the land
for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and
preserve this capacity.
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set
a bad example.
--La Rouchefoucauld
If I've made myself too clear, you must have misunderstood me."
--Alan Greenspan, Chairman, US Federal Reserve Board
When the land begins to be regarded, not as the primary source
of wealth, but as the plaything of gentlemen already rich, the
economy of the country is in questionable, if not dangerous
condition.
--Gerald W. Johnson
You know, they call it the Dust Bowl now. You see, folks, what
we're learning today now is that you can rob from nature just
the same way you can rob from any individual. It ain't just
robbin' from nature. It's robbin' from future generations.
--Will Rogers
The developer of a new idea may be described as having 'plowed
new ground', yet the plowshare may well have destroyed more
options for future generations than the sword.
The grass roots which formerly held the soil together are
decayed and gone, and now, when loosened by the plow, the soil
is easily drifted and blown away.
Dr A M Ten Eyck, 1911
It takes a rich land to support a democracy. Every time you see
a dust cloud, or a muddy stream, a field scarred by erosion or
a channel choked with silt, you are witnessing the passing of
democracy. The crop called man can wither like any other.
--Sterling North
They claim this Mother Earth of ours for their own and fence
their neighbors away from them... They compel the natural earth
to produce more excessively and when it fails, they force it to
take medicine to produce more. This is evil.
--Sitting Bull 1877
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you
please unless it causes others harm. With it comes the only
basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
--P.J. O'Rourke
To put the bounty and the health of our land, our only
commonwealth, into the hands of people who do not live on it
and share its fate will always be an error. For whatever
determines the fortune of the land determines also the fortune
of the people.
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo
the fatigue of supporting it.
--Thomas Paine
"The general attitude of the New Age seems to be
undiscriminating, and even to be against the whole idea of
discrimination."
When confronted with factual information that challenges
cherished beliefs, "the average New Age person reacts by simply
not wanting to talk to you any more - you have the wrong
attitude and possibly the wrong vibrations."
--John Rowan, author and psychotherapist
People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much
better press than people who are just funny and smart.
--Howard
Simons, "The Washington Post"
"It is well understood that nothing so excites the glands
of a free-market capitalist as the offer of a government
subsidy."
Political democracy can endure only as the guardian of economic
democracy, as I am by no means the first to say
I can remember when a good politician had to be 75 percent
ability and 25 percent actor, but I can well see the day when
the reverse could be true.
Moderation in temper is always a virtue;
--but
moderation in principle is always a vice.
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is
trying to please everybody.
The more time you spend in reporting on what you're doing the
less time you have to do anything. Stability is achieved when
you spend all your time doing nothing but reporting on the
nothing you are doing.
Amendment X:
--The powers
not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states
respectively, or to the people.
If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning
anything.
Although I can accept talking scarecrows, lions and great
wizards of emerald cities, I find it hard to believe there is
no paperwork involved when your house lands on a witch.
Where the creation of paper waste is concerned, technology is
proving to be not so much a contraceptive as a fertility
drug.
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--William Rathje and Cullen Murphy
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We should be thankful for the good things we have and, also,
for the bad things we don't have.
Save the whales. Collect the whole set.
It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at
human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and
least pleasant examples.
"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the
price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know
not what course others may take, but as for me, give me
liberty, or give me death!"
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in
hospitals dying of nothing.
There's a fine line between courage and foolishness.
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-- Too bad its not a fence.
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Don't worry about biting off more than you can chew. Your mouth
is probably a whole lot bigger than you think.
May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to
respond to the needs of others with kindness and
compassion.
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men
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--and the fools know it.
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-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days
of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were
stabled on the ground floor .....and figured out how to walk up
straight staircases.
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole
government working for you.
Macintosh
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-- we might not get everything right, but at least we
knew the century was going to end.
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--Douglas Adams, on the Y2K problem
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A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
One nice thing about egotists: They don't talk about other
people.
Ten two letter words to live by:
-- If it is to
be it is up to me.
If you wish to live wisely, ignore sayings
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their
shoes. That way, when you criticize them... you are a mile away
AND you have their shoes.
The mockingbird can change its tune eighty-seven times in seven
minutes. Politicians regard this interesting fact with
envy.
Mathematicians are the least expensive researchers to support.
All they need are pencils, paper, and a wastebasket
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-- and when they turn philosopher, they don't even
need the wastebasket!
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---Henry Cate III Life Collection
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A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two
cats.
--
In times of change, it is the learners who will inherit the
earth while the learned will find themselves beautifully
equipped for a world that no longer exists.
Redmond, WA
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-- Microsoft announced today that the
official release date for the new operating system
"Windows 2000" will be delayed until the second quarter
of 1901.
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-- Penny Pennington
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Our model citizen is a sophistocate who, before puberty,
understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty
will not know how to produce a potato.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man, a
presumption not supported by all the facts.
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually
passes for it.
Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or,
in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we
show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.
In central government culture, agencies and all, The career
structure is largely colonial, where movement towards the
centre is regarded as advancement. This does not relate to
rural situations, where movement towards home is more
diffucult, but infinitely more worthwhile.
By now it should be pretty obvious that central planning is of
a piece with absentee ownership and does not work.
All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the
cranberry meadows are raked into the city.
Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the
silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes
the wit that writes them.
"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so
much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right
to assume is to do at any time what I think is right."
Assessing the evidence which has accumulated over many years
has convinced us that anything which is good for Big Business
is bad for individuals and communities.
Not all landscapes should be inhabited by human beings, but
each of us is enriched to the extent that we can belong to, and
participate in, a well-ordered human community integrated into
the natural landscape of a particular place.
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments
are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
The objections which have been brought against a standing army
may also at last be brought against a standing government.
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which
governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more
rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to
this, which also I believe-"That government is best which
governs not at all"
We are often cautioned that we must live in the 'real world' by
folk who mean 'money', a concept more abstract than theoretical
physics.
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is
soon plowed into the soil for compost.
At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider
every spot as the possible site of a house. The future
inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their
houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated.
An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard,
wood-lot, and pasture, ...and then I let it lie, fallow,
perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of
things which he can afford to let alone.
The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of
the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the
trembling robe remains raised.
I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him
that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the
vision.
Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into
futurity.
The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not
repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and
rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear.
We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to
hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the
substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.
How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of
Heaven and of Earth!
They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify
their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments
to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors.
It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere,
above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all
sides.
We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little
interesting to me.
Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while
under these circumstances- have our own thoughts to cheer
us?
Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an abandoned
orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors."
Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together,
was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for
the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in
the ground;
-- indeed they
were not easily to be put off.
Do what you love, and the money will follow...
We are advised to live in the real world by those who mean the
economic world, the most abstract concept yet devised by
humankind.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and
pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and
soul alike.
Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in
awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash
your spirit clean.
I come more and more to look on each creature as living at the
center - one of the infinite number of centers - of an
arrangement of processes that reaches through the universe.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched
to everything else in the Universe.
The rooster crows but the hen produces.
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the
dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling;
vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal
dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in
its turn, as the round earth rolls.
Most people are on the world, not in it. - have no conscious
sympathy or relationship to anything about them -undiffused,
separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone,
touching but separate.
A man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or
believing he does - can live decently even in the understanding
that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its
complexity.
In wildness is the preservation of the world
The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of seeming a
fool.
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--William Least Heat Moon
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The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest
wilderness.
There is no reason to believe that the Truth, when found will
prove to be interesting
When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop,
striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through
space with all other stars all singing and shining together as
one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of
beauty.
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.
We tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a
wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of
progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency, and
demoralisation.
None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are
wild.
The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it
means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
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--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72
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Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly
get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere
dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
O wad som pow'r the giftie gie us
--To see
oursels as others see us!
--It wad frae
monie a blunder free us, an' foolish notion.
It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our
humanity.
I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air,
and the scenes in which pure air is found.
Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent
perspiration.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom
this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are
closed.
Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and
destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing
no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless
song out of one beautiful form into another.
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from
mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does
not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly
and courageously uses his intelligence.
There is not a "fragment" in all nature, for every relative
fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like
that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the
violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the
logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of
all ill.
Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness
comparable to the mountains.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former.
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent
one.
All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and
outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring ,
thundering waves and floods, the silent uproot of sap in
plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly,
beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though
nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a
miracle.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our
ignorance.
I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out
till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
We shall not 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.
One touch of nature...makes all the world kin.
Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do
so.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to
himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable
man.
As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds
sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood,
storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the
glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the
world as I can.
Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or
little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings
ever by their accents alone.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound
truth.
In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American
education is that students come away unable to distinguish
between a symbol and the thing the symbol stands for.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has
endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to
forgo their use.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
In any non-trivial axiomatic system, there are true theorems
which cannot be proven.
The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of
glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers,
prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the
world, have come down from the mountains
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
One day's exposure to mountains is better than carloads of
books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon
photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as
those of the human soul.
With each passing year, because of advances in computer
technology, there are more things, each more sophisticated,
that we aren't allowed to do any more.
We do not inherit the land, we borrow it from our children.
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-- Native American Proverb
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It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to
open one's mouth and remove all doubt.
Life is what happens to us while we're making other plans.
Be careful while reading health books, you might die of a
misprint.
Man is the only animal that blushes
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask
remains a fool forever.
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a
conclusion.
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
It has been said that the primary function of schools is to
impart enough facts to make children stop asking questions.
Some, with whom the schools do not succeed, become
scientists.
No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen
carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering
matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or
gardening - still all is Beauty!
If you really want to be lonely, get married.
The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the
darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes,
the heart of the people is always right.
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no
overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known
sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh
unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of
civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.
A person who won't think has no advantage over one who can't
think.
Going to the mountains is going home.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold
two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still
retain the ability to function.
Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then
goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Brought into right relationships with the wilderness, man would
see that his appropriation of Earth's resources beyond his
personal needs would only bring imbalance and beget ultimate
loss and poverty by all.
Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any
club that will have me as a member.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are
not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer
to reality.
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they
are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in
this world are the people who get up and look for the
circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make
them.
George Bernard Shaw
Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or
small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming
gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes - all are warm
with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them
I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are,
on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in
these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the
real meaning of the word, without coming here.
By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature
accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now
a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness
of time an outburst of organic life....
Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense
defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and
expense advocating them with words.