Teddy Roosevelt

The miner must have timber or he can not operate his mine, and in very many cases the profit which mining yields is directly proportionate to the cost of timber supply.

Unless the forests of the United States can be made ready to meet the vast demands which this growth will inevitably bring, commercial disaster, that means disaster to the whole country, is inevitable.

No man, here or elsewhere, is entitled to call himself a decent citizen if he does not try to do his part toward seeing that our national policies are shaped for the advantage of our children and our children’s children.

You are mighty poor Americans if your care for the well-being of this country is limited to hoping that that well-being will last out your own generation.

When wood, dead or alive, is demanded in so many ways, and when this demand will undoubtedly increase, it is a fair question, then, whether the vast demands of the future upon our forests are likely to be met.

Those of us who have lived on the great plains, who are acquainted with the conditions in parts of Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, know that wood forms an immensely portentous element in helping the farmer on these plains…

It is as sure as anything can be that we will see in the future a steadily increasing demand for wood in our manufacturing industries.

The manufacturing industries, whether or not wood enters directly into their finished product, are scarcely, if at all, less dependent upon the forest than those whose connection with it is obvious and direct.

The great industries of agriculture, transportation, mining, grazing, and, of course, lumbering, are each one of them vitally and immediately dependent upon wood, water, or grass from the forest.

We believe that at last forces have been set in motion which will convert the once distant prospect of the conservation of the forest by wise use into the practical accomplishment of that great end; and of this most hopeful and significant…

The difference means, as the difference in such a case always does mean, to a large extent the difference between mere agitation and actual execution, between the hope of accomplishment and the thing done.

The forest is for use, and its users will decide its future.

This is true because by far the greater part of all our forests must pass into the hands of forest users, whether directly or through the Government, which will continue to hold some of them, but only as trustee.

We want the active and zealous help of every man farsighted enough to realize the importance from the standpoint of the Nation’s welfare in the future of preserving the forests; but that help by itself will not avail.

I do not in the least underrate the power of an awakened public opinion; but in the final test it will be the attitude of the industries of the country which more than anything else will determine whether or not our forests are to be…

The prop of the country must be the business man who intends so to run his business that it will be profitable for his children after him.

That man is a curse and not a blessing to the country.

If the forest is destroyed it is only a question of a relatively short time before the business interests suffer in consequence.

The suffering of the industries in such case comes after the destruction of the forests, but it is just as inevitable as that destruction.

The producers, the manufacturers, and the great common carriers of the Nation had long failed to realize their true and vital relation to the great forests of the United States, and the forests and industries both suffered from that…

This congress may well be called a meeting of forest users, for that the users of the forest come together to consider how best to combine use with preservation is the significant fact of the meeting, the fact full of powerful promise for…

For the first time the great business and the forest interests of the Nation have joined together, through delegates altogether worthy of the organizations they represent, to consider their individual and their common interests in the…

This will continue to be the case as long as they strive to make the Filipinos independent, and stop all industrial development of the islands by crying out against the laws which would bring it on the ground that capitalists must not…

On the other hand, our people must keep steadily before their minds the fact that the justification for our stay in the Philippines must ultimately rest chiefly upon the good we are able to do in the islands.

The war which now unfortunately rages in the Far East has emphasized in striking fashion the new possibilities of naval warfare.