Below are some quotes on the topic of scenic conservation. You may find them inspirational, clever, or even useful in your efforts. Feel free to copy and paste a passage you find helpful, or use the “print” button at the top of the page to print the whole list.
President Lyndon B. Johnson:
In his February 8, 1965, call for the White House Conference on Natural Beauty:
I hope that, at all levels of government, our planners and builders will remember that highway beautification is more than a matter of planting trees and setting aside scenic areas. The roads themselves must reflect, in location and design, increased respect for the natural and social integrity and unity of the landscape and communities through which they pass.
Frank Lloyd Wright:
The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
David Ogilvy:
Founder of advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather, from his 1963 autobiography:
I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bikes, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?
And from his 1983 book “Ogilvy on Advertising”:
Billboards represent less than two per cent of total advertising in the United States. I cannot believe that the free-enterprise system would be irreparably damaged if they were abolished. Who is in favor of them? Only the people who make money out of them.
Ogden Nash:
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.
William F. Buckley, Jr.:
From an article in The Jeweler’s Eye entitled The Politics of Beauty:
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, and the big name libertarian theorists should go to work demolishing the billboarders’ abuse of the argument of private property.
Thomas Jefferson:
Communities should be planned with an eye to the effect on the human spirit of being continually surrounded by a maximum of beauty.
Theodore Roosevelt:
Here is your country
Do not let anyone take it or its glory away from your
Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skim
Your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
The world and the future and your very children shall
Judge you according as you deal with this sacred trust.
Supreme Court Chief Justice, Warren Burger:
Pollution is not limited to the air we breathe and the water we drink; it can equally offend the eye and ear.
Judge Tobriner in Metromedia, Inc. v. San Diego:
To hold that a city cannot prohibit off-site commercial billboards for the purpose of protecting and preserving the beauty of the environment is to succumb to a bleak materialism.
Howard Luck Gossage:
From one of the founding fathers of Madison Avenue and his book “Is There Any Hope for Advertising?”:
Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner’s permission: your field of vision. One might ask: doesn’t everything visible violate one’s field of vision? Not at all. Visibility is not the only consideration. The Taj Mahal, street signs, the Golden Gate Bridge, a maze of telephone wires, even a garbage dump ‑‑ however they may intrude on the eye ‑‑ are not where they are merely to waylay your gaze; they have other functions as well. A billboard has no other function, it is there for the sole and express purpose of trespassing on your field of vision. Nor is it possible for you to escape; the billboard inflicts itself unbidden upon all but the blind or the recluse.
Jeremy Male, CEO of advertising firm JCDecaux:
The great thing about outdoor advertising is that you can’t turn the page, you can’t switch it off – it’s just there.
Nicoletta McDonald:
Director of Sales for Pattison Outdoor Advertising, from the Calgary Herald, March 24, 2011:
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