David R. Brower Quotes

We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

I'm always impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it's impossible

The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.

There is no business on a dead planet

Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.

Without wilderness, the world's a cage.

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent

Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.

When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle.

Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms-the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning.

Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever.

We still need conservationists who will attempt the impossible, achieving it because they aren't aware how impossible it is.

Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.

If I could go back to a point in history to try to get things to come out differently, I would go back and tell moses to go up the mountain again and get the other tablet. Because the Ten Commandments just tell us what we are supped to do with one another, not a word about our relationship to the earth. Genesis starts with these commands: multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it. We have multiplied very well, we have replenished our populations very well, we have subdued it all too well, and we don't have any other instruction.

I believe in the rights of creatures other than man.

If you want to get people off drugs, improve reality.

There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river.

Polite conservationists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.

We may learn anew what compassion and beauty are, and pause to listen to the Earth's music.

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.

Sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this.

Have fun saving the world, or you are just going to depress yourself.

Politics is democracy's way of handling public business. We won't get the type of country in the kind of world we want unless people take part in the public's business.