Stewart Udall Quotes

There's not a single person in Arizona today who would say the Grand Canyon was a mistake.

The National Park Service today exemplifies one of the highest traditions of public service.

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.

The Atomic Age was born in secrecy, and for two decades after Hiroshima, the high priests of the cult of the atom concealed vital information about the risks to human health posed by radiation. Dr. Alice Stewart, an audacious and insightful medical researcher, was one of the first experts to alert the world to the dangers of low-level radiation.

The atomic weapons race and the secrecy surrounding it crushed American democracy. It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality.

In a region with a growing population, if you're doing nothing, you're losing ground.

I like the story about Henry David Thoreau, who, when he was on his death bed, his family sent for a minister. The minister said, 'Henry, have you made your peace with God?' Thoreau said, 'I didn't know we'd quarreled.'

Society as we know it is almost a conspiracy against human health. One of the main forces working to counteract that is the trailsman.

Federal judges are just very reluctant to stick the government with responsibility.

The auto industry must acknowledge that a rational transportation policy should seek a balance between individual convenience, the efficient use of limited resources, and urban-living values that protect spaciousness, natural beauty, and human-scale mobility.

The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the Native American shared this elemental ethic: The land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures.

I plowed fields with horses and worked as a hired hand in high school for 50 cents a day.

A land ethic for tomorrow should ... stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life.

Some environmentalists have had the feeling that Indians are not good stewards. I've always been critical of that.

For those who want to understand the issues of the environmental crisis, Encounters with the Archdruid is a superb book. McPhee reveals more nuances of the value revolution that dominates the new age of ecology than most writers could pack into a volume twice as long. I marvel at his capacity to listen intently and extract the essence of a man and his philosophy in the fewest possible words.

If you want inner peace, find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.

Nuclear energy people perceive the greenhouse effect as a fresh wind blowing at their back.

Nature will take precedence over the needs of the modern man.

Washington's a cesspool of money.

As the master politician navigates the ship of state, he both creates and responds to public opinion. Adept at tacking with the wind, he also succeeds, at times, in generating breezes of his own.

Nixon was a good president on the environment. Gerald Ford was good.

Gross National Product is our Holy Grail.

I think the Colorado Plateau is the most scenic area in the world - let's begin with that. Not just the United States.

The real story of the settlement of the West was work, not conquest

So many people of my generation who served in the government were prisoners of the Cold War culture, still are.

I don't like the term 'dynasty.'

Admittedly, we must move ahead with the development of our land resources. Likewise, our technology must be refined. But in the long run life will succeed only in a life-giving environment, and we can no longer afford unnecessary sacrifices of living space and natural landscape to 'progress.'