“As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.”

Botany is based on fixed genera.

Nature’s economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics.

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none.

We admit as many genera as there are different groups of natural species of which the fructification has the same structure.

Fragments of the natural method must be sought with the greatest care. This is the first and last desideratum among botanists. Nature makes no jumps. All taxa show relationships on all sides like the countries on a map of the world.

Linnea- A plant of Lapland, lowly, insignificant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space – from Linnaeus who resembles it.

In natural science the principles of truth ought to be confirmed by observation.

A herbarium is better than any illustration; every botanist should make one.

A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discovers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.

If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.

Natural bodies are divided into three kingdomes of nature: viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Minerals grow, Plants grow and live, Animals grow, live, and have feeling.

It is not God, but people themselves who shorten their lives by not keeping physically fit.

A practical botanist will distinguish at the first glance the plant of the different quarters of the globe and yet will be at a loss to tell by what marks he detects them.

The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.

The plant kingdom covers the entire earth, offering our senses great pleasure and the delights of summer.

Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure, and the song of birds.

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life – but there was no one to tell me.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.