The Big Burn Quotes

“There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune," Roosevelt said just before he became president.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Better for a man to fail, he said, even "to fail greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“What better way can an old man die than doing a young man’s work?”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Far ahead of his time, and to the criticism of isolationists in his own party, Roosevelt tried to get the major nations of the world to come together and take stock of the globe they shared.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“In Pinchot, he saw someone "who could relish, not run from a rainstorm," as he wrote. Just like himself.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“I care to live only to entice people to look at nature’s loveliness,” Muir said,”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“By the early estimates of the rangers, the fire had burned enough wood to provide timber for the whole nation for fifteen years.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Leave it as it is. You cannot improve it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Ideas take on their own trajectory, but they die without people to carry them into the corridors of power.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Of all the foes which attack the woodlands of North America, no other is so terrible as fire.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“By trying to stop all major wildfires, the Forest Service had only fed the beast. The woods were full of dry, dying, aging timber and underbrush—fuel. Big swaths were unhealthy, in need of a cleansing burn. Even with their armies, their aerial support, their billions in taxpayer money to hold back the flames, rangers became increasingly helpless. As firefighting took up nearly half the Forest Service budget, it was a mission at odds with the course of the natural world, and common sense. It was not what Roosevelt and Pinchot had in mind. The years brought bigger, hotter, longer, earlier wildfires. With a warmer climate, it all added up to something catastrophic on the horizon.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“It is high time to realize that our responsibility to the coming millions is like that of parents to their children, and that in wasting our resources we are wronging our children.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Suddenly the idea flashed through my head that there was a unity in this complication,” he wrote in his memoir. “To me it was a good deal like coming out of a dark tunnel. I had been seeing one spot of light ahead. Here, all of a sudden, was a whole landscape.” It was a philosophy of the land, grounded in Pinchot’s study of forestry, but more sweeping, with a moral, spiritual, and political dimension. “The earth, I repeat, belongs of right to all its people, and not to a minority, insignificant in numbers but tremendous in wealth and power.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune,” Roosevelt said just before he became president.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Onward and upward he pushed until rock, ground, and forest came to an end, until there was nothing but a sharp edge of blunt earth protruding in the late light of the range, where he could see well beyond the park boundaries to national forest land that he had once scouted on foot and horseback. He remembered it then as roadless, the only trails being those hacked by Indians and prospectors. He had taken notes on the flora and fauna, commented on the age of the bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, the scrub oak in the valleys, the condors overhead, the trout in alpine tarns. He had lassoed that wild land in ink, returned to Washington, and sent the sketch to the president, who preserved it for posterity. What did Michelangelo feel at the end of his life, staring at a ceiling in the Vatican or a marble figure in Florence? Pinchot knew. And those who followed him, his great-great-grandchildren, Teddy's great-great-grandchildren, people living in a nation one day of five hundred million people, could find their niche as well. Pinchot felt God in his soul, and thanked him, and weariness in his bones. He sensed he had come full circle.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America