Quotes About The National Parks

#1. The national parks belong to everyone. To the people. To all of us. The government keeps saying so and maybe, in this one case at least, the government is telling the truth. Hard to believe, but possible.

Edward Abbey

#2. Folk music isn't owned by anybody. It is owned by everybody, like the national parks, the postal system, and the school system. It's our common property. There is nobody's name on it. Nobody can make money on it. It's not copywritten.

Utah Phillips

#3. However useful may be the National Parks and Forests of the West for those affording the Pullman fare to reach them, what is needed by the bulk of the American population is something nearer home.

Benton MacKaye

#4. We are conditioned by the national parks to link beauty and environmental value, a prejudice that makes as much sense as thinking attractive people form better friendships than plain people.

Charles Wohlforth

#5. It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.

William Kittredge

#6. Yellowstone, of all the national parks, is the wildest and most universal in its appeal... Daily new, always strange, ever full of change, it is Nature's wonder park. It is the most human and the most popular of all parks. -Yellowstone Park for Your Vacation (circa 1920s)

Susan Rugh

#7. If you take away the predators in the prairies and the national parks, you suddenly have an explosion of elk, and then you have a lack of the food source for the elk, so they strip all the ground bare and that takes away the cover, on and on and on and on. The whole food chain is disrupted.

Peter Benchley

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

Wallace Stegner

#9. National parks, zoos, protected areas, polluted seas - using the whole world as a readymade, I thought about it as a stage set. To activate a stage set you need a drama, an actor to offset it.

Aleksandra Mir

#10. National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

Wallace Stegner

#11. Whatever the cost, however financed, the benefits for park visitors in health and happiness
virtues unknown to statisticians
would be immeasurable.

Edward Abbey

#12. I could walk forever with beauty. Our steps are not measured in miles but in the amount of time we are pulled forward by awe. This is another gift from our national parks, to be led by the vistas, to forget what nags us at home and remember what sustains us, the horizon.

Terry Tempest Williams

#13. The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity, but straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. So we confidently believe it will be with our great national parks and forest reservations.

John Muir

#14. It was a practical trip, straight across the country. No pit stops at canned meat museums, no national parks. Just a whole lot of Wynebraskowa.

Kari Martindale

#15. Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue - why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?

Robert Adams

#16. The itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things. Let them and leave them alone
they'll survive for a few more thousand years, more or less, without any glorification from us.

Edward Abbey

#17. If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea,

Wallace Stegner

#18. In a world that is becoming increasingly virtual, the parks remain places of visceral beauty. Places where we can remember that we are but a small part of the life on this planet, and that it is a truly wonderful planet and the only one we've got.

Nevada Barr

#19. If owning frivolous articles of excess were indeed the trappings of malevolence, my home was ready to play host to the Axis powers.

Michael Gurnow

#20. Another example of that was that even during the economic problems of the 1945 government, we managed to carry out other aspects of our policy and other ideals. Through the establishment of national parks, for instance.

Barbara Castle

#21. The establishment of the National Park Service is justified by considerations of good administration, of the value of natural beauty as a National asset, and of the effectiveness of outdoor life and recreation in the production of good citizenship.

Theodore Roosevelt

#22. One hundred years ago, visionary political leaders from the Progressive Era established a system of national forests and parks in our country that are the envy of the world and today are the treasure of an entire nation. Why not a similar, global vision for our generation?

Eban Goodstein

#23. As strenuous challenge or contemplative retreat, the parks and other units of the national lands offer welcome respite from the world, a safety valve for body and spirit.

T. H. Watkins

#24. Family trips to Yellowstone and to what are now national parks in Southern Utah, driving the primitive roads and cars of that day, were real adventures.

Paul D. Boyer

#25. At least Ozymandias had a statue erected in his name. If I were to have died at that moment, the only thing I had managed to erect in my honor was a shrine to China's manufacturing capabilities.

Michael Gurnow

#26. Costa Rica, with its tourist-based economy and lack of a national army, has focused on keeping safe its beaches, parks and other public draws. It is one if the safest countries in Central America based on the number of homicides.

Laura Chinchilla

#27. Teachers can go on cruises with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and anyone can spend the summer as a volunteer in a National Parks and even earn money doing it.

Matthew Lesko

#28. National parks and reserves are an integral aspect of intelligent use of natural resources. It is the course of wisdom to set aside an ample portion of our natural resources as national parks and reserves, thus ensuring that future generations may know the majesty of the earth as we know it today.

John F. Kennedy

#29. As soon as the first piece of foliage came within blade's reach, my student started frantically swinging the machete like he was defending his virtue from a trove of drunken, handsy woodland elves. 'I feel like I'm in the movie Predator,' he said as he decapitated a flower.

Michael Gurnow

#30. I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.

Ann Zwinger

#31. My wife simply quoted, 'For better or worse.' It was only then that I realized the phrase was not multiple-choice.

Michael Gurnow

#32. I had not been prepared for my employer's approach to vehicular navigation, which was a simple case of being unable to tell the difference between a very large, multi-windowed van that could accommodate a mobile disco and a Formula One racer.

Michael Gurnow

#33. The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

Robert Smithson

#34. As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

Ann Zwinger

#35. The National Park Service today exemplifies one of the highest traditions of public service.

Stewart Udall

#36. Few things in this world evoke scrotum-shriveling fear in a man like a group of frowning women, enraged to the point of atypical silence, ambling toward him with an obvious agenda.

Michael Gurnow

#37. The same people in the Congress who are busy kicking holes in the social safety net are also those who would sell off the nation's forests for a song, give away its national parks, and trash its wilderness preserves; there is a connection between the two impulses.

Paul Gruchow

#38. Gifts that are most appreciated are often associated with the country, or even better, the specific location you are from. These kinds of gifts may include coffee table picture books of your city or national parks, or mugs, t-shirts, paperweights, and so on that display your company or school logo.

Matthew B. Christensen

#39. For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not?

Edward Abbey

#40. What mothers need, as well as fathers, spouses, and the children of aging parents, is an entire national infrastructure of care, every bit as important as the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, broadband, parks and public works.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

#41. The National Park Service shot a mule in the face. He survived but had trouble swallowing and often food came out of his nose.

Cleveland Amory

#42. We have a certain group of people in this country that seem to want to lock up our national treasures, our national parks, and cherished places and keep the public from enjoying them.

Don Sherwood