Famous Environmental Quotations

Below are several quotations that relate to the environment and rivers, from some famous and some not so famous persons. Many are profound and stir the emotion or imagination, but they all have something to say about our environment, our perspective of and our relationship to it. If you know of a quotation relating to the environment that you think might be appropriate to include on our website, please let us know by sending it and/or its source to us at info@fssr.org.

The quotations below are organized and listed alphabetically by author. If you are looking for a specific author, you can click on that authors name in the table below to link to their section of this page.

Ansel Adams - Photographer

Once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.

Banyacya, Hopi Indian Elder

We made a sacred covenant to follow the Creator's life plan at all times, which includes the responsibility of taking care of this land and life for His divine purpose. We have never made treaties with any foreign nation, including the United States, but for many centuries we have honored this Sacred Agreement. Our goals are not to gain political control, monetary wealth nor military power, but rather to pray and to promote the welfare of all living beings and to preserve the world in a natural way.

- Hopi Elder Banyacya addresses the UN, 1992

Alan Bible, Senator, Nevada

We labor long and earnestly for peace, because war threatens the survival of man. It is time we labored with equal passion to defend our environment. A polluted stream can be as lethal as a bullet.

Hal Boyle, Author

What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else.

Buffalo Joe

The song of the river ends not at her banks, but in the hearts of those who have loved her.

Rachel Carson, Author, Biologist, Conservationist

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 on the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.

- Sense of Wonder, 1965

Chinese Philosopher

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it.

Jacques Cousteau

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.

Leonardo da Vinci

When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.

Gretel Ehrlich, Author

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop...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 upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.

- Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991

Albert Einstein

Today's problems cannot be solved if we still think the way we thought when we created them.

Loren Eiseley, Anthropologist, Philosopher, Writer

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.

- Nature, 1836

Laura Gilpin, Photographer

A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.

- The Rio Grande: River of Destiny, 1949

Jane Goodall, Primatologist, Anthropologist

"It would be absolutely useless for any of us to work to save wildlife without working to educate the next generation of conservationists."

Kenneth Grahame, Author

"So this is a River!"

"The River," corrected the Rat.

"And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!"

"By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. "It's brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! The times we've had together..."

- The Wind in the Willows, 1908

Roderick Haig-Brown, Conservationist, Writer

I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water...has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.

Heraclitus of Ephesus, Greek Philosopher

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

Hermann Hesse, Poet, Novelist, Painter

The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.

- Siddharta, 1922

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Supreme Court Justice

A river is more than an amenity.... It is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.

- New Jersey v. New York, 4 May 1931

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poet

What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Lady Bird Johnson

The environment is where we all meet, where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become.

- Lady Bird Johnson, 1967

Lyndon B. Johnson

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.

– President Lyndon B. Johnson, on the signing of the Wilderness Act of 1964

... the time has also come to identify and preserve freeflowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory.

- President Lyndon Johnson's Message on Natural Beauty

John M. Kauffmann, Author

Rivers have what man most respects and longs for in his own life and thoughta capacity for renewal and replenishment, continual energy, creativity, cleansing.

- EPA Journal. May 1981

Charles Kuralt

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people…. We are a nation rich in rivers.

- Charles Kuralt, American Rivers Board Member

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.

- The Magic of Rivers

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers.

Aldo Leopold, Author, Forester, Environmentalist

The good life on any river may...depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive.

Luna Leopold, Geomorphologist, Hydrologist

Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children's lifetime. The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land.

Alan Levere, Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection

A river is the report card for its watershed.

Barry Lopez, Author

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

Norman Maclean, Author

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops under the rocks are the words and some of the words are theirs.

- A River Runs Through It

Bob Marshall, Forester, Conservationist

Swift or smooth, broad as the Hudson or narrow enough to scrape your gunwales, every river is a world of its own, unique in pattern and personality. Each mile on a river will take you further from home than a hundred miles on a road.

Thomas Merton, Author

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

- Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966

A. A. Milne, Author

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.

- Pooh's Little Instruction Book

Thomas Moore

We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul.

A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river, and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost.

- Re-enchantment of Everyday Life

John Muir, Author, Conservationist

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

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

The Sun shines not on us but in us. The Rivers flow not past, but through us.

Gaylord Nelson, Senator

Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.

- Late U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day and Counselors of The Wilderness Society

Lynn Noel, Author

The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land.

The first river you paddle runs through the rest of your life. It bubbles up in pools and eddies to remind you who you are.

- Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

Alvin O'Konski, Congressman, Wisconsin

Our precious heritage of natural and unspoiled beauty and unpolluted streams, once exhausted and destroyed, can never be replaced.

Tim Palmer, Author

Streams represent constant rebirth. The water flows in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again.

The river is the center of the land, the place where the waters, and much more, come together. Here is the home of wildlife, the route of explorers, and recreation paradise. . . . Only fragments of our inheritance remain unexploited, but these streams are more valuable than ever.

Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills and fears. People stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers' reflections of our lives and experiences are endless. The water calls up our own ambitions of flowing with ease, of navigating the unknown. Streams represent constant rebirth. The waters flow in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again.

- Lifelines: The Case For River Conservation

Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves. Our planet is beset with a cancer which threatens our very existence and which will not respond to the kind of treatment that has been prescribed in the past. The cancer of water pollution was engendered by our abuse of our lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans; it has thrived on our halfhearted attempts to control it; and like any other disease, it can kill us. We have ignored this cancer for so long that the romance of environmental concern is already fading in the shadow of the grim realities of lakes, rivers and bays where all forms of life have been smothered by untreated wastes, and oceans which no longer provide us with food.

When we save a river, we save a major part of an ecosystem, and we save ourselves as well because of our dependence physical, economic, spiritual, on the water and its community of life.

- The Wild and Scenic Rivers of America

Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service

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

John Wesley Powell, explorer of the American West

I wish to make it clear to you, there is not sufficient water to irrigate all the lands which could be irrigated, and only a small portion can be irrigated....I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict!

- John Wesley Powell, Speech, Los Angeles International Irrigation Conference, 1893

Plutarch, Greek Historian

Water is the principle, or the element, of things. All things are water.

Sandra Postel, Author

For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports. We have been quick to assume rights to use water but slow to recognize obligations to preserve and protect it... In short, we need a water ethica guide to right conduct in the face of complex decisions about natural systems we do not and cannot fully understand.

- Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity

Jeff Rennicke, Author

There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats.

- River Days: Travels on Western Rivers

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Poet

I like rivers
Better than oceans, for we see both sides.
An ocean is forever asking questions
And writing them aloud along the shore

- Roman Bartholomew, 1923

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes hills and streams and plains the mountains over our land and nature's wealth deep under the earth are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.

Thoedore Roosevelt

The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem, it will avail us little to solve all others.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired in value.

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.

The public must retain control of the great waterways. It is essential that any permit to obstruct them for reasons and on conditions that seem good at the moment should be subject to revision when changed conditions demand.

Carl Sagan

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.

Jonas Salk

If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within fifty years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within fifty years all forms of life would flourish.

John Sawhill, President, The Nature Conservancy

A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.

Tanako Shozo, Japanese Conservationist

The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart.

Bob Shuster, Congressman

Clean water is not an expenditure of Federal funds; clean water is an investment in the future of our country.

- Washington Post, January 9, 1987

Wallace Stegner

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

- Wilderness Letter, written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, 1960

Edwin Way Teale

To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I chatter, chatter as I flow to join the brimming river, for men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.

- The Brook, 1887

Henry David Thoreau

Many go fishing all their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.

What is the use of a House if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.

Ted Turner

Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world.

Stewart Udall

Is a society a success if it creates conditions that impair its finest minds and make a wasteland of its finest landscapes?

Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all but brief tenants on this planet.

We can misuse the land... or we can create a world in which physical affluence and affluence of the spirit go hand in hand.

We must develop a land conscience that will inspire those daily acts of stewardship which will make America a more pleasant and more productive land. If enough people care enough about the world outside their door to join in the fight for a balanced conservation program, communities will flourish, and this generation can proudly put its signature on the land.

- The Quiet Crisis, 1963

T. H. Watkins, Historian, Writer

Love is a powerful tool, and maybe, just maybe, before the last little town is corrupted and the last of the unroaded and undeveloped wildness is given over to dreams of profit, maybe it will be love, finally, love for the land for its own sake and for what it holds of beauty and joy and spiritual redemption that will make wilderness not a battlefield but a revelation.

– Redrock Chronicles: Saving Wild Utah, 2000

E. O. Wilson, Biologist, Naturalist, Author

In amnesiac reverie it is also easy to overlook the services the ecosystems provide humanity. They enrich the soil and create the very air we breathe. Without these amenities, the remaining tenure of the human race would be nasty and brief.

- The Diversity of Life