American Geographer Quotes

William Morris Davis
Ellsworth Huntington
Ellen Churchill Semple

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.

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

The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that, in spite of man's boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the frozen North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind.

Ellsworth Huntington
Ellsworth Huntington
Science is therefore not final any more than it is infallible.

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

We have not yet learned the difference between yield and loot.

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 important characteristic of plains is their power to facilitate every phase of historical movement; that of mountains is their power to retard, arrest, or deflect it. Man, as part of the mobile envelope of the earth, like air and water feels always the pull of gravity.

Ellen Churchill Semple
Ellen Churchill Semple