"It's a constant struggle. I like to point out that we on our side can never win. All we can do is get a stay of execution for a very special place on the Earth because there are always going to be people coming along who've got other ideas about what to do for the place besides save it. They would exploit it and that was fair enough up until we got down to such a little bit, such a vestige of wildness on the Earth. Now, I think, wildness gets precedence. They've got to make the case that wildness is innocent until proved guilty and they're going to have a tough time proving it guilty."
-- David Brower

"They're selfish people. They would like to preserve vast stretches of rivers and vast ranges of mountains for the few. Just those that can take time off a backpack into the wilderness areas and enjoy the pristine world like Davy Crocket and others did - Daniel Boone. Well we're not living in Daniel Boone's days any longer. We're living with 200 million people, not 50 million and we have to develop our resources sensibly and properly."
-- Floyd Dominy, Former Commissioner, Bureau of Reclamation

"Americans are never going to be done with this debate about how much land should be set aside as wilderness - how wilderness should be used, how it should be managed - because it does flow from our past. It does flow from trying to protect some static vision of what our past should be. It also, in some ways, represents our conflicted sense of our future; of how our progress should proceed - what parts of the landscape ought not to be part of that progress. I don't see that set of questions disappearing. They're going to be on our political agenda for a long, long time."
-- William Cronon, Historian