If the American people are not fit for popular government, and if they should of right be the servants and not the masters of those whom they themsel… - Theodore Roosevelt

The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books

Generally the thunder-storms came in the afternoon, but once I saw one at sunrise, driving down the high mountain valleys toward us. It was a very beautiful and almost terrible sight; for the sun rose behind the storm, and shone through the gusty rifts, lighting the mountain-crests here and there, while the plain below lay shrouded in the lingering night. The angry, level rays edged the dark clouds with crimson, and turned the downpour into sheets of golden rain; in the valleys the glimmering mists were tinted every wild hue; and the remotest heavens were lit with flaming glory.

Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization—for, properly speaking, there was no one movement—were very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire—and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.