Land Policy Quotes

An allusion has been made to the Homestead Law. I think it worthy of consideration, and that the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefitting his condition.

Alien ownership of land should be prohibited…. all lands now owned by aliens should be reclaimed by the government and held for actual settlers

America’s forests and waters must come into the hands of not a few men who speculate in them, but be distributed among many men, each of whom intends to make a home upon the land.

All lands now owned by aliens should be reclaimed by the government and held for actual settlers only.

[Andrew] Jackson could be woefully wrong, He was an unapologetic defender of slavery and the main architect of Native American Removal. Even before he was President his many Indian wars destroyed much of tribal culture in a headlong grab for land.

The idea of giving to the homeless citizen a homestead is a humane one; but our public-land policy ought to be confined to that, and no one should be allowed to speculate in the common inheritance of all.

The Communal Land Rights Bill then said, since there would be those collectives set up in terms of the other legislation, there was no need for them to set up other structures to deal with the land issues.

I have long believed these types of collaborative agreements are a far better approach to federal land management than the contentious battles that too often sidetrack proper resource management.

Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the 'Dust and Ashes Act,' any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title.

I don't support deed transfer of lands.

The primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes… You can start a prosperous home by destroying the forests, but you cannot keep it prosperous that way.

I have always been a strong supporter of public lands and have voted against the transfer or sale of public lands. My position is known and well-established.

We do not ever want our land policy to be shaped so as to create a big class of proprietors who rent to others..

Because the public lands belong to all Americans, this 1872 Mining Act should be repealed.

How a regulation so unjust in itself, so foreign to the authority of Congress, and so hurtful to the sale of public land, and smelling so strongly of an antiquated bigotry, could have received the countenance of a committee is truly a matter of astonishment.

After the Republican party got into power it turned around and granted the public domain to corporations and opened it to private speculators .... in violation of the principle announced in the platform of 1852. The land grants were a mistake, to draw it mildly and we may as well all admit it now ; it was a great wrong to grant a single acre of the public domain to corporations.... Every acre of the public lands should have been held for homes for the people, under a well-guarded homestead law. That was the proper way to deal with the public domain; but instead of that it was thrown open to ruthless speculators, who have speculated in it until the poor people of this country to-day have to fight for standing room

We have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific slope, the Rocky Mountains, and great plains States will take the lead in the preservation and right use of forests, in securing the right use of waters, and in seeing that our land policy is not twisted from its original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change when such change is necessary in the life of that purpose, the purpose being to turn the public domain into farms each to be the property of the man who actually tills it and makes his home in it.

I've been very clear all along that public lands must stay in public hands.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.

One hundred and fifty years ago the vacant lands of the West were opened to private use. One hundred years ago the Congress passed the Homestead Act, probably the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted. Under the impetus of that Act and other laws, more than 1.1 billion acres of the original public main have been transferred to private and non-federal public ownership. The 768 million acres remaining in federal ownership are a valuable national asset.

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.