The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
Interpretation
Degrading the land leads to the downfall of a society.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's quote emphasizes the vital connection between a nation's health and its environment. It suggests that when a country fails to protect and preserve its natural resources, particularly its soil, it undermines the foundation of its own existence and future prosperity.
In practice
In an environmental lecture about sustainable practices.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations rise trying once more to become the forest just beyond them tall enough to be called trees in their youth like aspen a bouquet of young beech is gathered they still wear last summer's leaves the lightest brown almost translucent how their stubbornness has decorated the winter woods.
...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.
Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
When you drink in nature through your senses, you deepen your awareness of the great silent intelligence flowing through all things. You nourish your mind, body, and spirit as you connect to the divine love of Being.
The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.
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