The Wilderness Warrior Quotes

“Conservation,” Pinchot famously wrote, “means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.”
― Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 1858-1919

“Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying that “the game belongs to the people.” So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The “greatest good for the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916)”
― Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 1858-1919

“survival of the fittest”—which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer”
― Douglas G. Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 1858-1919

“doughty scrawl of his signature, a conservationist weapon, set aside for posterity (or for “the people unborn”* as he put it) over 234 million acres, almost the size of the Atlantic coast states from Maine to Florida (or equal to one out of every ten acres in the United States, including Alaska.) 54 All told, Roosevelt’s acreage”
― Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 1858-1919

“We have taken forward steps in learning that wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day,” Roosevelt said, “but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.”
― Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 1858-1919

“promoted hunting—and eating game—more assiduously”
― Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 1858-1919