Quotes from Stewart Udall

It gives me satisfaction to help people.

It is obvious that the best qualities in man must atrophy in a standing-room-only environment.

Washington's a cesspool of money.

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

Where nature is concerned, familiarity breeds love and knowledge, not contempt.

It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality.

If, in our haste to 'progress,' the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America. We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.

Lady Bird Johnson did more than plant flowers in public places. She served the country superbly by planting environmental values in the minds of the nation's leaders and citizens.

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 the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the U.S. government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history.

The environmental effects of the automobile are well known: motor vehicles cause, for example, as much as 75 percent of the noise and 80 percent of the air pollution in our cities, and the industry must face mounting pressure from environmentalists.

The Indians may have in their religion and culture a reverence for the land. But then they get into the pressures created by modern society. Unless they are reasonably well-educated, they can't deal with them.

Over the long haul of life on the planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.

I'm trying to encourage my children's generation and the other ones coming to return to basic American principles.

I don't like the term 'dynasty.'

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.

The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth.

Wilderness, like the national park system, was an American idea.

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

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

Auto executives have shunned the limits-of-growth issues and concentrated nearly all their energies on the next quarter's sales and next year's models.

A limit on the automobile population of the United States would be the best of news for our cities. The end of automania would save open spaces, encourage wiser land use, and contribute greatly to ending suburban sprawl.

Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite our fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all brief tenants on this planet. By choice, or by default, we will carve out a land legacy for our heirs.

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