Olmsted Quotes & Sayings

She's the kind of person who can lick everything but a stamp. — Mark Olmsted

To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. "I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future," he wrote. "In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years. — Erik Larson

Dripping charnel
grounds of light -
I examine hope &
fear -
blue-black body
monster of
enlightenment -
call me Youthful
Lightning Bolt -
tired I slump -
desire's already
here - I don't
care -
my wrathful
rosary coiled
snake
on my cushion -
I close my tired
eyes -
sleep has been
troubled but
my mother's
cancer hasn't
spread -
still I
am the Cemetary
King — Marc Olmsted

The enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation connected with them is thus a monopoly, in a very peculiar manner, of a very few very rich people. The great mass of society, including those to whom it would be of the greatest benefit, is excluded from it. In the nature of the case private parks can never be used by the mass of the people in any country nor by any considerable number even of the rich, except by the favor of a few, and in dependence on them. — Frederick Law Olmsted

We are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety. And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears at times made it difficult for him to attend to conversation. He was still full of creative steam, still constantly on the move, but overnight train journeys invariably laid him low. Even in his own bed his nights often became sleepless horrors laced with toothache. — Erik Larson

There is no doubt that the widespread consumption of antibiotic-laden meat is bad for us. Ample evidence fingers this massive drug use in our meat industries as a key contributor to one of the biggest health concerns of the modern era, the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, aka superbugs. This is not some future science fiction. It is killing people right now - lots of people. The CDC called antibiotic resistance one of the five greatest health threats facing the nation, and new drug-resistant — Larry Olmsted

As demand for cotton grew, slavery was considered indispensable as a means of maximizing profit for this labor-intensive staple crop. Equally important, as we shall see, slaves could be financed - that is, purchased on credit. In financial parlance this is called leverage. Planters had one objective: increased cotton production. Arguments about the optimum size of a cotton farm are irrelevant because of slavery's financing characteristic. Simply put, the goal was more cotton, which called for financing the purchase of more land and more slaves. Because a mechanical means of solving cotton's production needs did not exist until the mid-twentieth century, cotton demanded an endless supply of black bodies as long as the price of cotton permitted financing. The Northerner Frederick Law Olmsted, — Gene Dattel

With regard to the moral and religious condition of the slaves, I cannot, either from what I observe, or from what is told me, consider it in any way gratifying. — Frederick Law Olmsted

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth. — Frederick Law Olmsted

at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it. — Bill Bryson

Too bad the guards are looking for irony. It's everywhere in here. — Mark Olmsted

Fred Olmsted sat at the edge of the stagecoach seat, chattering to his father about their trip. How exciting to see the towns and forests of western New York! Suddenly, Fred stopped talking. That roar in the distance could only be one thing. Niagara Falls! — Julie Dunlap

If we analyze the operations of scenes of beauty upon the mind, and consider the intimate relation of the mind upon the nervous system and the whole physical economy, the action and reaction which constantly occur between bodily and mental conditions, the reinvigoration which results from such scenes is readily comprehended ... The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system. — Frederick Law Olmsted

This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work - they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps. — Frederick Law Olmsted