"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." — John Muir John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
"I have written of inanimate things, rock and water, frost and sun; and it might seem as though this were not a living world. But I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air. All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird—all are one." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"For the duller and fainter we became the clearer was our vision, though only in momentary glimpses. Then, after the sky cleared, we gazed at the stars, blessed immortals of light, shining with marvelous brightness with long lance rays, near-looking and new-looking, as if never seen before." — John Muir Steep Trails
"I had not known that the sunrise was so lavish and that you could actually feel the color when it reached your face." — Craig Childs The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
"Where the water fell clear of the rock icicles hang, thick as a thigh, many feet in length, and sometimes when the wind blows the falling water askew as it freezes, the icicles are squint. I have seen icicles like a scimitar blade in shape, firm and solid in their place. For once, even the wind has been fixed." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"Taking the same trail in the opposite direction is like walking on the other side of time. Everything looks different on the way back. Same trees, same stobs and snags. Same switchbacks and curves; same vistas, same fallen tree bridge across the creek. But going back the way you came, it’s just as easy to lose your footing, but it’s harder to get lost. The light shines on things you didn’t notice on the way there. The path back, it’s the story you tell yourself, afterward." — Alexis M. Smith Marrow Island
"The more we need it, the less we have." — Heather Hansman Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West
"I feel that what women can offer to the wilderness is concern and care. The more people who love something, the more chance that something has to survive. If you learn to enjoy a walk in the woods more than an afternoon in a shopping center, you’ll be willing to fight to keep precious undeveloped areas, especially near population centers, from going under concrete." — Maggie Nichols via Anne LaBastille Women and Wilderness
"Beauty is the door to another world." — Voytek Kurtyka Alpinist Magazine, Issue 43, "The View from the Wall"
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." — Edward Abbey The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West
"The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending." — Naomi Kline This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
"The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want. … Nostalgia for an earlier ignorance is not the domain of this discussion." — Barbara Kingsolver Small Wonder
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering." — 4th Doctor Doctor Who, "The Face of Evil"
"Don’t hate what you don’t understand." — John Lennon
"Television news is driven by compelling visuals, not by the intrinsic importance of the story being cast. Complicated, nonphotogenic issues requiring any considerable background information (global warming, for example) get left out of the running every time. Meanwhile, viewers are lured into assuming, at least subconsciously, that this ‘news’ is a random sampling of everything that happened on planet earth that day, and so represents reality." — Barbara Kingsolver Small Wonder
"Decisions are best made by the people affected by them." — Gloria Steinem My Life on the Road
"The most dangerous worldview is the view of those who have never looked at the world." — Alexander von Humboldt
"Clearly, what gets declared a crisis is an expression of power and priorities as much as hard facts. But we need not be spectators in all this: politicians aren’t the only ones with the power to declare a crisis. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too." — Naomi Kline This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
"Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act; it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil." — Yvon Chouinard Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
"To do good, you actually have to do something." — Yvon Chouinard American Express commercial
