It has been proved that the land can exist without the country - and be better for it; it has not been proved ... that the country can exist without the land.
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any
A great reputation is a great noise, the more there is of it, and the further does it swell. Land, monuments, Nations, all fall, but the noise remains, and will reach to other generations.
God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice... Our finest moments have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.
I watched the land for as long as I could, until it disappeared behind its shawl of mist, and until I had it fixed in my mind - unchanged, mysterious and beautiful
I had this thought a while ago,
"My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind bitter land."
And I grew weary of the sun
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face, or worse--
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil.
The farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself.
To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
Democracy disciplined and enlightened is the finest thing in the world. A democracy prejudiced, ignorant, superstitious, will land itself in chaos and may be self-destroyed.
The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. ...[I]t is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.
Good stewardship of the environment is not just a personal responsibility, it is a public value... Our duty is to use the land well, and sometimes not to use it at all. This is our responsibility as citizens, but more than that, it is our calling as stewards of the earth.
Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at whatis inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.