The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
Interpretation
Degrading the land leads to the downfall of a society.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's quote emphasizes the vital connection between a nation's health and its environment. It suggests that when a country fails to protect and preserve its natural resources, particularly its soil, it undermines the foundation of its own existence and future prosperity.
In practice
In an environmental lecture about sustainable practices.
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.
I have thought that wild flowers might be the alphabet of angels, β whereby they write on hills and fields mysterious truths, which it is not given our fallen nature to understand.
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.
The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding β to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.
The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.
Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
How beautiful is the rain!_x000D_ _x000D_ After the dust and the heat,_x000D_ _x000D_ In the broad and fiery street,_x000D_ _x000D_ In the narrow lane,_x000D_ _x000D_ How beautiful is the rain!
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