We think of our land and water and human resources not as static and sterile possessions but as life giving assets to be directed by wise provisions for future days.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of treating natural resources as vital assets for the future rather than mere possessions.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's quote highlights the perspective that land, water, and human resources should be viewed as dynamic and essential elements for sustaining life. He advocates for a thoughtful and strategic approach to managing these resources, ensuring that they contribute positively to future generations rather than being exploited or neglected.
In practice
During a environmental conference, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of sustainable resource management.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.
I've been bitten by a python. Not a very big one. I was being silly, saying: 'Oh, it's not poisonous...' Then, wallop! But you have fear around animals.
The truth of the matter is, the birds could very well live without us, but many -- perhaps all -- of us would find life incomplete, indeed almost intolerable without the birds.
The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.
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