Vast Lands Quotes & Sayings

Americans have long recognized the need to protect our public lands and their vast resources. — Barbara Boxer

Middle East and Africa is a product of failed states unable to keep up with the age of accelerations and enable their young people to realize their full potential. But these trends are exacerbated by climate change, population growth, and environmental degradation, which are undermining the agricultural foundations that sustain vast African and Middle Eastern populations on rural lands. The combination of failing states and failing agriculture is producing millions of young people, particularly young men, who have never held a job, never held power, and never held a girl's hand. That — Thomas L. Friedman

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past. — Will Self

In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism - only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire. — Isaac Deutscher

Nobody else exists to me when he lands. Everything stops existing when he takes off, as if he takes it all with him when he goes up there, to places I'll never see again. That vast open non-place of emptiness that only becomes significant when his comrades are there, too, and of course the enemy fighters guarding the bombers bound for Berlin. — Aleksandr Voinov

Only by establishing military supremacy were the European and North American colonizers able to eliminate the crafts and industries of Third World peoples, control their markets, extort tribute, undermine their cultures, destroy their villages, steal their lands and natural resources, enslave their labor, and accumulate vast wealth. — Michael Parenti

Something in this meadow and places like it, humble and hidden, offers respite and moments of calm for the wild, adventurous soul that plagues the boys of the world, the wanderer's soul that gnaws and aches inside of them even unto gray manhood. It is the plague of horizons, the plague of the next river bend, the plague that drives men over the vast oceans into strange lands beyond the edges of the maps. — R.W. Schmidt

With the discovery of vast new North American energy resources - thanks to the application of proven technologies like hydraulic fracturing and commonsense regulatory processes on non-federal lands - the U.S. government should no longer be in the business of spending taxpayer dollars on risky, exotic energy projects. — Fred Upton

Watching the vast ocean, the flickering sunlight, thinking of the distant lands, Eliza was enveloped by a feeling quite unlike any she'd experienced before. A warmth, a glimpse of possibility, an absence of wariness- — Kate Morton

A three billion year old planet floating in the vast universe with mountains, seventy percent seas and oceans, fertile lands, immense forests, rivers and lakes, sea shores and deserts, this is where we humans have the privilege to live, the latest, most advanced newcomers in evolution. What an immense, incredible responsibility we have to be a right, positive element in the further evolution of that planet. That is the big question before us in the new century and millennium. — Robert Muller

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans
vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants. — William Butler Yeats

Long, long ago, when the mountains were but hills and the ungirdled oceans were pools and meres, a vast darkness lay over eastern lands. Whilst on western shores the foundations of the three thrones were still part of the living rock and the Raith Sidhe had not grown to an eighth of their later strength, in the East a foulness reigned. — Robin Jarvis

Some look like us, most look very different. No two worlds are exactly alike. But every world, no matter how alien or strange, is part of a vast mosaic that floats on an ocean of love. Here I'm only talking about the physical worlds. There are dimensions beyond those you can see with your eyes. There are the realms of the gods, the lands of the demons, the vast kingdoms of the angels. All these places are spoken about in ancient scriptures but somehow people have forgotten that they're true. — Christopher Pike

We are consuming our forests three times faster than they are being reproduced. Some of the richest timber lands of this continent have already been destroyed, and not replaced, and other vast areas are on the verge of destruction. Yet forests, unlike mines, can be so handled as to yield the best results of use, without exhaustion, just like grain fields. — Theodore Roosevelt

Within an hour Groves's teletype rattled out a translation. My fellow Germans! I live! Yet another of the countless atrocities that have befallen our lands has stricken Berlin - but not me. I am speaking to you so that you can hear my voice and know that I myself am not injured and well. The vast crime in Berlin has destroyed the entire center. But it cannot destroy the inevitable victory of the National Socialist Reich! My survival is a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence - and — Gregory Benford

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge ... wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it. — George Eliot

Vast migrations of people - some voluntary, most not - have shaped the human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression, and famine today than at any other time in human history. As the Earth's climate changes in the coming decades, there are likely to be far greater numbers of environmental refugees. Better places will always call to us. Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet. But the lands we run to now have already been settled. Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight, are there before us. * — Carl Sagan

It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters - a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. — W.E.B. Du Bois

When I was operating as one of President Reagan's economic advisers, an early assignment was to analyze the federal government's landholdings and make recommendations about what to do with them. This was a big job. These lands are vast, covering an area six times that of France. — Steve Hanke