Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes

It's very important that we keep these special, wild places. It defines the United States. Imagine our country without our national parks and our monuments. Here in California, imagine if you didn't have in Southern Cal the Channel Islands or the great Highway 1, Big Sur up to Point Reyes up to the Redwood country.

Wilderness, like the national park system, was an American idea.

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.

In the hierarchy of public lands, national parks by law have been above the rest: America's most special places, where natural beauty and all its attendant pleasures - quiet waters, the scents of fir and balsam, the hoot of an owl, and the dark of a night sky unsullied by city lights - are sacrosanct.

What covers 13 million acres, sleeps 60 million people, and desperately needs money? America's state parks.

The American people want to preserve their American heritage, and they have the quaint belief that public lands belong to them as much as to the people of the state where the lands are located.

Tell them to go and see their own land—visit the National Parks…

Maybe you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but like every American, you carry a deed to 635 million acres of public lands. That's right. Even if you don't own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and many other natural treasures.

Americans have long recognized the need to protect our public lands and their vast resources.

In my 31 years in Congress, I have seen a lot of changes. We made some substantial policy changes that have improved our parks system and our public lands.

India's elite wants not just cosmetic environmentalism, but a consumer-environmentalism. It wants to have good areas to go for tourism to. So it's happy to have national parks, because people can go for wildlife tourism. Or good beaches. But they don't want, and don't care about, a livelihood environmentalism.

Describing his job as State Parks Commissioner:] You're always visiting wonderful places, seeing historic sites.

We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few.

We have our work cut out to make sure our outdoors will always remain accessible.

I will protect public lands.

The Great American Outdoors Act is a significant opportunity to invest in our public lands, including treasures in the 11th District like the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and Morristown National Historical Park.

For a variety of reasons, I believe, the time is right to resolve many of the long standing and thorny land use, recreation, and wilderness designation issues in Central Idaho.

And preserving our open spaces or having them there for recreational purposes is one of the things that contributes to the high level of quality of life that we offer in Pennsylvania, and that also translates into economic benefits.

Preserving parks and open spaces is a winner because it doesn't need to be explained to everyday Americans.

The outdoors, the beautiful environment, both in fresh and salt water. And the thing that concerns me is the amount of kids that stand on street corners, or go into pinball parlours, and call it recreation.

Our responsibility for BLM lands is multiple-use, meaning a variety of needs and uses.

And the beautiful open spaces, the forests of Pennsylvania, the recreational uses that come from having these green open spaces and forests, they contribute dramatically to the level of our tourism, dramatically.

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.

For him nature is basically a golf course or a ranch--or a national park turned into a country club where folks can burn off stress by speeding over the snow while polluting the air of Yellowstone with gas-guzzling skidoos.

Parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply.