"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness by destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste."

– Wallace Stegner (Author)

"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."

– Rachel Carson

"The great purpose is to set aside a reasonable part of the vanishing wilderness, to make certain that generations of Americans yet unborn will know what it is to experience life on undeveloped, unoccupied land in the same form and character as the Creator fashioned it . . . It is a great spiritual experience. I never knew a man who took a bedroll onto an Idaho mountainside and slept there under a star-studded summer sky who felt self-important that next morning. Unless we preserve some opportunity for future generations to have the same experience, we shall have dishonored our trust."

– Former Senator Frank Church

"I believe that at least in the present phase of our civilization we have a profound, a fundamental need for areas of wildernesss – a need that is not only recreation and spiritual but also educational and scientific, and withal essential to a true understanding of ourselves, our culture, our own natures, and our place in all nature."

– Howard Zahniser (former employee of the Bureau of Biological Survey)

"How often we speak of the great silences of the wilderness and of the importance of preserving them and the wonder and peace to be found there. When I think of them, I see the lakes and rivers of the North, the muskegs and expanses of tundra, the barren lands beyond all roads. I see the mountain ranges of the West and the high rolling ridges of the Appalachians. I picture the deserts of the Southwest and their brilliant panoramas of color, the impenetrable swamplands of the South. They will always be there and their beauty may not change, but should their silences be broken, they will never be the same."

– Siguard F. Olson