Political Quotes

“I think we do have a genuine difference of opinion. I am aware, and I am sure my colleague is, too, that 95 percent of the Federal public lands under the management of the Bureau of Land Management are currently open for oil and gas drilling. I do believe it is not unreasonable to say that 5 percent of the Federal lands that we own are so important to our national heritage that we are not going to go in and drill. No matter whether you can sneak in there and come out again and folks say, ``We were not even sure they were there,'' every time you do that you run a risk--I am sure the Senator from Montana knows that--that it will not be as clean an operation as you want it to be. You run a risk you will change an ecological balance in an area that has been the same for centuries. I think it is not unreasonable for us to say, as we do in our normal lives, there are certain places that are treated differently than others. We treat our churches a little differently than we treat our shopping malls. We just view them differently. I think when it comes to our national treasures, our national monuments, it is not unreasonable to say these are areas which will be treated differently.”