Geographer Quotes

Alexander von Humboldt

Richard Francis Burton

Élisée Reclus

Halford Mackinder

William Morris Davis

Ellsworth Huntington

Yi-Fu Tuan

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

William Morris Davis

Our earth is a star among the stars; and should not we who are on it prepare ourselves by it for the contemplation of the universe and its Author?

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

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.

Edward Augustus Ackerman

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

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.

Gilbert F. White

If the great geological labours of the oceans, such as the erosion of cliffs, the demolition of promontories, and the construction of new shores, astonish the mind of man by their grandeur, on the other hand, the thousand details of the stands and beaches charm by their infinite grace and marvelous variety.

Élisée Reclus

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world.

Halford Mackinder

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

Anaximander the Milesian, a disciple of Thales, first dared to draw the inhabited world on a tablet; after him Hecataeus the Milesian, a much-travelled man, made the map more accurate, so that it became a source of wonder.

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

Need for a knowledge of geography is greater than the need of gardens for water after the stars have failed to fulfil their promise of rain.

Yaqut al-Hamawi

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

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

We had now entered the notorious county of Tipperary, in which more murders and assaults are committed in one year than in the whole Kingdom of Saxony in five.

Johann Georg Kohl

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

Arthur H. Robinson

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.

Richard Hartshorne

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.

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

Alan MacEachren

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.

Belistiche, a woman from the coast of Macedonia, won with the pair of foals … at the hundred and twenty-ninth Olympics.

The great and solemn spirit that pervades the intellectual labor [of science] arises from the sublime consciousness of striving toward the infinite, and of grasping all that is revealed to us amid the boundless and inexhaustible fullness of creation, development, and being.

Alexander von Humboldt

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.

Life, atom of that Infinite Space that stretcheth, 'twixt the Here and There.

Richard Francis Burton