While William F. Buckley, Jr. will be primarily remembered as the intellectual father of modern conservatism, he also cared deeply about the integrity of America's landscapes and cityscapes.

Buckley was a prolific writer and more than once he expressed his disdain for the callousness with which outdoor advertisers deprecated the public realm with their signs, as if they had some inherent right to do so.

Yes, William F. Buckley Jr. was no fan of billboards. The quote above is from an article titled "The Politics of Beauty," first published in Esquire magazine in July, 1966. A more famous excerpt, from the same article, is below.

"As such the billboards are acts of aggression...against which the public is entitled, as a matter of privacy, to be protected. If a homeowner desires to construct a huge Coca-Cola sign facing his own homestead rather than the public highway, in order to remind him, every time he looks out his window, that the time has come to pause and be refreshed, he certainly should be left free to do so. But if he wants to face the sign toward us, that is something else..."