Douglas Brinkley Quotes

Teddy Roosevelt of course was a great outdoorsman all his life.

My favorite memories growing up in North Carolina were hunting and fishing with my father and brothers. There, I developed a deep appreciation for protecting land and waterways. There, I learned outdoorsmanship.

I have a ranch in Montana, but it's not a real working ranch. I've always liked the outdoors. I come from Texas. My grandfather was a farmer; that's as close as I come.

Attention! Land Thieves and Natural Resources Grabbers …. Under [Theodore] Roosevelt any doubt about the power of the Chief Executive to make withdrawals of public land was resolved in favor of the people.

I hunt and fish, and I don't fly on Lear jets, and I don't smoke Cuban cigars.

My father was a great outdoorsman. From when I was about six we would spend countless hours together in the woods or on a lake. He taught me how to skin a rabbit and pluck a wild turkey. He showed me there is much more to nature than we can ever understand.

I did a story for the Geographic on Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and Stephen Ambrose was the writer. He said, "I've got the easiest job in the world. I just have to re-tell the story of the greatest fishing, camping, hunting, canoeing trip of all time. You, Sam, have the hardest job, which is, pretend like nothing has happened in the last 200 years.

This isn't just about today, this about generations to come. And you've got a chance to be the greatest conservation President since Theodore Roosevelt, and I think he's done it.

I can't help thinking that if the American West were discovered today, the most glorious bits would be sold off to the highest bidder. Yosemite might be nothing but weekend homes for Internet tycoons.

I look at trees, hunt mushrooms, and watch animals. Fishing is what gets me out into the woods so I can notice these things.

The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Spending two years on my uncle's ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.

In the 1880s, a weedy Easterner named Owen Wister had something like a nervous breakdown. Wyoming, with its wide-open spaces and healthy pursuits, was prescribed as a cure. Wister was immediately smitten by the taciturn cowboys and the rules imposed upon them by the cattle barons.

I felt only as a man can feel who is roaming over the prairies of the far West, well armed, and mounted on a fleet and gallant steed.

My father was what you would call a cowboy, a vaquero; he worked out in the ranches with cattle. And my mother came from farmers down in the valley.

From first to last the civilization of America has been bound up with its physical environment.

What people don't understand is this is something that we only have in America. There is no other country in the world where the ordinary citizen can go out and enjoy hunting and fishing. There's no other nation in the world where that happens. And it's very much a part of our heritage.

Conservation has been in eclipse in this country ever since Theodore Roosevelt’s day. It had barely gotten off the ground when Uncle Joe Cannon, the Speaker of the House in those days, issued his ultimatum: “Not 1 cent for scenery.” Well, today we are repealing Cannon’s law. We are declaring a new doctrine of conservation.

Here was all these cheap long-horned steers over-running Texas; here was the rest of the country crying out for beef -- and no railroads in Texas to get them out. So they trailed them out, across hundreds of miles of wild country

The West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States.

We knocked the Twightwies and Chictaghicks on the head because they had cut down the trees of peace which were the limits of our country. They had hunted beavers on our land and killed them all, both male and female.

General Phil Sheridan... had urged the destruction of the bison herds, correctly predicting that when they disappeared the Indians would disappear along with them; by 1885 the bison were virtually extinct, and the Indians were starving to death on the plains. ...the Indian Wars finally ended; and with the enforced peace came an economic recession in the West, for the United States government had spent there about one million dollars for every Indian killed by 1870.

Deer are as plentiful as chickens on a farm.

I have seen two tremendous works of nature in America—the Niagara Falls and Mr. [Theodore] Roosevelt.

At some point, I stumbled across my two main protagonists: William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered professor of history picked by Roosevelt to be America's first ambassador to Nazi Germany, and Dodd's comely and rather wild daughter, Martha, who at first was enthralled with the so-called Nazi revolution.