Bruce Babbitt Quotes

We had kind of a rocky start, but I spent a lot of time working with the President and handing him statistics and showing him what we were doing as we went along and kind of saying to him, you know, this is really important.

City parks serve, day in and day out, as the primary green spaces for the majority of Americans.

Protecting all this land, working with the President to establish all these monuments, to, you know… I think the President has a land protection record that’s second to no one in this century, maybe Teddy Roosevelt.

Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress.

I look back on it, yeah, I’m in a much worse financial position than I was eight years ago. I’m going to have to go out at age 62 and kind of readdress some of that.

We must identify our enemies and drive them into oblivion.

The Northwest is in better shape than it was eight years ago.

Taxes are the flip side of expenditures. The same issues apply on both sides. There are questions of fairness and justice as much in the way you take money away as in the way you disburse it.

What I finally did in 1995 was I said, I’m going to get out of this town and I’m going to go out West.

Obviously I wouldn’t have said that three or four years ago in the midst of it. But I really believe that. It’s been a marvelous and important experience.

I grew up in the West, grew up on the land, was educated as a geologist.

I think the people will – who advocate having a step back and read those public opinion polls on the front page of the newspapers all over this country saying public supports restoration in restoration of the Everglades, protection of the parks and the creation of monuments.

We have to preserve it and use it sustainably. And the short-term use of resources at the destruction of the long-term heritage of this country is not a policy that we can pursue.

I wouldn’t miss this opportunity for anything. For the chance to work on these conservation issues, to serve my country, to work for this president, I’d do it all over again, every single minute.

Look, this job has always been a crucible of conflict.

Look, I think by the time my case was over and other ones, everybody on both sides of the aisle in Congress said we can’t run a government by this kind of process and they repealed the law and that’s good.

We’ve set aside tens of millions of acres of those northwestern forests for perpetuity. The unemployment rate has gone not up, but down. The economy has gone up.

We have an obligation to live in harmony with creation, with our capital… with God’s creation. And we need to administer and work that very carefully.

No kidding. That’s really true. You’re paying your own bills through this. It’s not a pleasant experience.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

This isn’t just about today, this about generations to come. And you’ve got a chance to be the greatest conservation President since Theodore Roosevelt, and I think he’s done it.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it’s time for special counsel.

I am one of those people who deeply resents not having been born in the 19th century, when there were still open places to explore.

Well, I think breathing life into the Endangered Species Act, taking those wolves back into Yellowstone, restoring the salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest.

I would argue that practices that destroy ecosystems always destroy jobs.