Quotes About Preservation

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

T]he whole human population of the world cannot live on imported food. Some people some where are going to have to grow the food. And where ever food is grown the growing of it will raise the same two questions: How do you preserve the land in use? And how do you preserve the people who use the land? The farther the food is transported, the harder it will be to answer those questions correctly.

Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence - that is to wish to preserve all of its humble house - holds and neighbourhoods.

The preserver of abundance is excellence.

I have, to fill my mind and occupy my hands, the daily rounds of my economy. I have food to harvest and preserve in the summer and fall, firewood to gather and saw up and split in the fall and winter, the garden to prepare and plant in the spring. I have clothes and bedclothes to wash, and myself to keep clean and presentable. I have the endless little jobs of housekeeping and repair... I have books to read, and much to sit and watch.

And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.

God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it. If God loves the world, then how might any person of faith be excused for not loving it or justified in destroying it?

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

The easy assumption that we have remembered the most important people and events and have preserved the most valuable evidence is immediately trumped by our inability to know what we have forgotten.

The land here is being carelessly killed. (pp 54)

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.

Instead of sacking cities and wrecking temples he showed a courteous respect for the deities of the conquered, and contributed to maintain their shrines; even the Babylonians, who had resisted him so long, warmed towards him when they found him preserving their sanctuaries and honoring

God preserve me from my friends," he concluded; "I will take care of my enemies myself.

History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved.

The record is broken and incomplete, not because India ever rested, but because war and the idol-smashing ecstasies of Moslems destroyed uncounted masterpieces of building and statuary, and poverty neglected the preservation of others.

The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.

Uncounted species--not just charismatic animals like tigers, gorillas, rhinos, and saola but an even larger number of obscure rodents, amphibians, birds, and reptiles--have been pressed to the brink. We hardly know them, and yet within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth's biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.

And older still, he might have divined the true reason: that the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father's being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity.

Once again, then," she said, "the divide between the ambitions of conspirators and the desire, among those bringing us word of those ambitions, to preserve whatever aspect of the status quo they themselves hold dear.

Wolves? I should have known. Of course you have wolves. Doesn't everybody?" She snapped her fingers. "The gun, Lucian. Hand it over. I've decided I have to shoot you after all. It's the only way to preserve my sanity.

The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It's been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal.

We know everything about the Earth now, except how to keep her alive.