John Burroughs Quotes

It's not like Alaska isn't wilderness - it mostly is. But most Alaskans don't live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It's just like anyplace else, only with mountains and moose.

Because the quality of living with nature and allowing it to manifest itself is different than the quality of living in a city, especially a dense city.

I feel this is very important for us to have serene buildings because our civilization is chaotic as it is, you see; our whole machine age has brought about a chaos that has to be somehow counterbalanced, I think.

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

If you live in a squalid environment, then of course you are going to want to get out of it, you are probably going to want to get into the country, because that's what it does.

God made the country, and man made the town.

Growing up in the country, you're left to the wilds of your imagination.

Now this problem of the adjustment of man to his natural resources, and the problem of how such things as industrialization and urbanization can be accepted without destroying the traditional values of civilization and corrupting the inner vitality of its life—these things are not only problems of America; they are the problems of men everywhere.

My real personality comes out in the country. More spontaneous, more excited. There's always someone watching you in the city - you're a sort of zoo animal. My true nature is to want to hide a bit.

I grew up 150-200 miles from any city. You simply didn't have much connection with the outside world. So my dreams were always to get out. It's a familiar kind of thing, I think, for anybody in a small town.

Speed is one of the great curses of modern civilization, obsession with speed leads to quantitative approach; we come to believe that more is better. This is very materialistic, we have to realize that it is the quality of life, quality of relationships, quality of food, medicine, education and everything else which matters.

For work, I have to be living in cities, I really cherish the time when I get to be out in the countryside.

I think many people have this sense that something about modern society - the screens, the noise, the traffic, the constant busyness - has approached a point where living in the world feels somewhat unhealthy.

My vision for the country is to urbanise rural areas. What is available in the cities must be available in the villages.

The message has to go to U.P. and Bihar that there is no space left in Mumbai for you. After destroying the city, the migrants will go back to their villages. But where will we go then?

In SW1 you don't really need survival skills, you just exist.

People crave community, more efficient living, and easier access to the places they want to go.

I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.

Young people are choosing cities before the country - they have their own ranking.

I look forward the day that I could work on my farm, create music, write books, and be with the wife and kids around the clock - and live a normal life.

To secure our future prosperity, we must do all that we can to make sure that Britain remains one of the safest and cleanest places in the world to do business.

I do think I am a country boy at heart. I love the buzz of towns and going out with friends and sitting with them drinking and whatever - it's fun - but, at the same time, I like space and freedom.

... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

Humankind has no option but to protect and live in harmony with its natural environment. However, it would be regrettable if in putting an end to revolutionary extremism, we should then come to environmental extremism. We should not forget that all extremes are the same.