Quotes About Stewardship

We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence - that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I've tried to keep before myself. What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.

When people learn to preserve the richness of the land that God has given them and the rights to enjoy the fruits of their own labors then will be the time when all shall have meat in the smokehouse corn in the crib and time to go to the election. (W.C. of Rural Neck KY in a letter to Farmers Home Journal - 1892)

He had nothing he could do with is life's work now except leave it to a man who thought nothing of it.

There can be no such thing as a "global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.

For agrarians, the correct response is to stand confidently on our fundamental premise, which is both democratic and ecological: the land is a gift of immeasurable value. If it is a gift, then it is a gift to all the living in all time. To withhold it from some is finally to destroy it for all. For a few powerful people to own or control it all, or decide its fate, is wrong.

Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth sharpened by technological instruments... But if he is Viceroy, then all decay and trouble in the created world that surrounds him is in some measure to be laid to his account

If God has given you a talent, do not use it ungratefully.

Animals shouldn't be hunted and nature shouldn't be disturbed, even destroyed, to benefit the whims of mankind

God has not failed to provide enough to fill every mouth. But He has given this world over to the administration of men, and it is their bad management they must correct rather than blame God. At least their incapable administration should teach them the saving grace of humility.

Whether or not you have children yourself, you are a parent to the next generation. If we can only stop thinking of children as individual property and think of them as the next generation, then we can realize we all have a role to play.

The land is everyone's and no one's.

Why are we destroying the land instead of taking care of it? It takes care of us.

If you are physically sick, you can elicit the interest of a battery of physicians; but if you are mentally sick, you are lucky if the janitor comes around.

God bless America. Let's save some of it.

Anybody who wants to rule the world should try to rule a garden first.

We do not inherit this land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

Before us they planted, and now we eat what they have planted. We too must plant, so that those after us will likewise eat.

There was once a merchant who was so rich that he might have paved the whole street, and a little alley besides, with silver money. But he didn't do it--he knew better how to use his money than that.

Management must manage!

But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there'll be a reckoning. Who knows?

The responsibility of the great states is to serve and not to dominate the world.

The Franklin didn't only belong to Tasmanians. Nor our forests. They belonged to the world. We were custodians.

A good logger does not raze the forest, but only thins it.