"I hope they can be saved." The late Marjory Stoneman Douglas's response in 1996 when Cesar Becerra asked her to assess the state of the Everglades on the eve of Everglades National Park's 50th anniversary.

"Floridians have spent most of the 20th century trying to destroy the Everglades, and much of it trying to save the Everglades, often at the same time." Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, 1991

"Six thousand farms have been sold in the Everglades since the first of March. Does this look like failure? Isn't the drainage of the Everglades responsible for it all? And isn't it the greatest thing that has ever happened to Florida?" Editorial, The Miami Metropolis, 1909

"I will never live to see the changes you ask me about. Indian should stay Indian. I will not leave my hammock again. I do not want to see my people take up white man's ways." Mrs. Smallpox Tommy, translated from Miccosukee in The Miami News, 1962

"It is as if surgeons had cut a patient in half, forced him to drink poison -- and expected him to live." George Howe Colt on the the challenge of Everglades restoration in Discovery Magazine, 1994

"Everglades has no single feature, no prominent point of interest now or ever. It is a mosaic of many things seen, smelled, heard and endured." Daniel Beard, first superintendent of Everglades National Park, 1950

"We do not think it is extreme to protect the land of our ancestors and the future of our children. It hurts us to watch as our sacred Everglades lands die." Billy Cypress, Chairman, Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, 1996

"Today we are confronted with the bare fact that only by absolute protection throughout the years, and that only under Federal super-vision can we hope to maintain adequate provisions so that much of our most important wildlife will not altogether disappear." Ernest Coe, "father" of Everglades National Park, 1931

"The accepted definition of a glade is a narrow strip of grassy land between forests. The big glade is all or "ever" glade. In this way, no doubt, the term Everglade originated." -- John Gifford, Forester, 1911

"Maybe the park people saw better than I did, that the developers, the retirees, and the sport fishermen might have soon gobbled up most of the mangrove swamps and mudflats, plus every darn piece of shell land high enough to stand on without getting your feet wet." The Late Totch Brown, Everglades pioneer, 1993

"You can't shut down farming, but you can't destroy the environment either. They have to coexist." Bob Buker, Jr., Senior Vice President of U.S. Sugar, Inc., 1993

"Basically, we do not belong in the Everglades. None of us. Environmentalists, sugar barons, real estate developers, hunters, fishermen, bird watchers, tomato farmers, dope dealers or bureaucrats. The only people who should be in the Everglades are the Indians." Jimmy Buffett, musician, 1996

"Everglades National Park, Florida City: Vast sawgrass park, scarce services, buggy in summer." Discouraging description in Florida Atlas & Gazetter, 1989

"You can't be fourth in growth and rank 47th in taxes. Sooner or later we're going to have to bite the bullet and pay the taxes to protect our resources." John De Grove, growth expert, on Florida, 1990

"There are plenty of other trees that will grow in our drained and fertile areas, but the chief value of the Cajeput (Melaleuca) is that it will grow and thrive on land so poor and wet that nobody knows what else to do with it." A.H. Andrews, editor of The American Eagle of Estero, Fla., 1947

"It is not the way of the white man, particularly the American, to limit the development of his enterprises to the boundaries imposed by nature." William H. Bischoff, 1947

"The restoration involves more than 20 state and federal agencies, a large number of environmental groups and local officials. They all mix in committees, working groups and task forces whose overriding function seems to be traveling to one meeting after another." Cyril T. Zaneski, environmental reporter, The Miami Herald, 1997

"National parks are national treasures and the general public is realizing this more fully with each succeeding year. Our enthusiasm for this proposed new one [Everglades NP] is well grounded and in time we will be forgiven for our seeming over-enthusiasm." Florida Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen, 1931

"To this day, the golf courses of South Florida are more assiduously tended than the Everglades. Florida's famous river of grass is being used not only as a fountain, but as a toilet." Carl Hiassen, author, 1995

"This ain't America anymore. You got park rangers dictating. They tell you these rules, those rules, then these rules some more. It's rules by fools, and they call it land-use management." Joe Lord, 1984, regarding Big Cypress National Preserve evicting squatters

"Them bureaucrats admitted right in public that wild four-legged critters was down 70 percent, and the birds 95 percent. I said, 'You aimin' to wait until the other 5 percent is gone before you admit you don't know what you're doin'?" Speck Daniels in Lost Man's River by Peter Mathiessen, 1997

"It is absolutely essential that the [Tamiami] Trail be rebuilt into a highway second to none in the state, that dangerous bridges be eliminated and that ample roadside parking facilities be improved." --W.A. Shands, Florida gubernatorial candidate, 1947

"It is the dream of my life to see this wilderness turned into a prosperous country and where this tangled mass of vine, brush, trees and rocks now are to see homes with modern improvements surrounded by beautiful grassy lawns, flowers, shrubs and shade trees." Julia Tuttle, a founder of Miami, late 1800s

"Florida must cease to be purely a region to be exploited and flung aside, having been sucked dry, or a recreation area visited by people who come only for a good time, who feel no responsibility, and have no desire to aid and improve the land of their temporary enjoyment." -- Thomas Barbour, 1945