Famous quotes containing the words government and/or botanist:
“In using the strong hand, as now compelled to do, the government has a difficult duty to perform. At the very best, it will by turns do both too little and too much. It can properly have no motive of revenge, no purpose to punish merely for punishments sake. While we must, by all available means, prevent the overthrow of the government, we should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society.”
—Abraham Lincoln (18091865)
“No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)