Current Quote by Douglas Tompkins

The national park is the best idea America ever had.

— James Bryce

If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that…

— Wallace Stegner

The national park idea has been nurtured by each succeeding generation of Americans. Today, across our land, the National Park System represents America at…

— George B. Hartzog Jr

It is important that the remaining scenic areas of the country be at once made into State or National Parks. Fortunately there still are…

— Enos Mills

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

— Wallace Stegner

The byproduct of the main thrust to protect the biodiversity of a given place is that you get especially young people out to the…

— Douglas Tompkins

Civilization in our time is driven by materialism and troubled by pollution, over-population, corruption, and violence. National parks can hardly be uncoupled from the…

— Michael Frome

“To develop a national park is to not have one.”

— Lee H. Whittlesey

If you take guys like Exequiel Bustillo, the architect who designed the early park infrastructure in Argentina, or the great American architects, these guys…

— Douglas Tompkins

National parks and reserves are an integral aspect of intelligent use of natural resources. It is the course of wisdom to set aside an…

— John F. Kennedy

At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization…

— Bill Bryson

A national park is not a playground. It's a sanctuary for nature and for humans who will accept nature on nature's own terms.

— Michael Frome