20th-century Geographer Quotes

Yi-Fu Tuan
Jacques Bertin
Vaclav Smil

Geography is that discipline that seeks to describe and interpret the variable character from place to place of the earth as the world of man.

A graphic is never an end in itself; it is a moment in the process of decision making.

Jacques Bertin
Jacques Bertin
To make maps that work, we must depict categories using methods that match the structures of human mental categorization.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the sheer overwhelming dominance of London makes it extremely for provincial cities to develop more than a very restricted financial function. London, in that sense, is akin to the notorious upas tree, a fabulous Javanese tree so poisonous that it destroys all life for many miles around itself.

Mathematical equations and literary phrases are useful but they are no substitute for the spatial eloquence of the map.

The sound of progress is perhaps the sound of plummeting hypotheses.

America is a much newer experiment in human living, one with moral concerns at its core. In this respect it differs from Europe, which has preferred sophistication and worldly wisdom to "righteousness," and resembles China, which saw the universe itself as essentially a moral order. However materialistic Americans may be in their economic pursuits, their ceremonies emphasize the material far less than European societies have. America has imposing official architecture. Washington, D. C., boasts a radial baroque stateliness. Yet one of its most important buildings, the White House, is a modest dwelling, its scale far smaller than that of the palaces of Europe and Asia.

Yi-Fu Tuan
Yi-Fu Tuan
No matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

Vaclav Smil
Vaclav Smil
One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development.

The mind of the scientist, no less than that of the poet or musician, must be structured by thought and experience before it reaches the creative stage.

Strange indeed sounds the language of poets and philosophers; stranger still the refusal of science to read and hear its message.