“Dear Friend-- My partner, Will Geary, got to putting on airs and I shot him and he is dead. The potatoes is looking well. Yours truly, Snookum Jim.”

“According to the Iroquois, when the Creator made the animals of the earth, He shot each one in the left hind leg so that humans would be able to catch them, but He missed the wolf.”

“One day during his time in the Southwest, Leopold and several companions chanced upon a female wolf ans shot her. "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes --something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

“Quipped one frustrated Colorado rancher in the early 1920s, "Wolves have all been trapped at, shot at, and poisoned at so long that they can damn near speak English!"...To the specter of the rancher, the most we can say today is that wolves have yet to learn the language of humans, while we, if only in the most primitive fashion, have begun listening to theirs.”

“For centuries the wolf was North America's beast, an animal transmogrified into a mythic and blood-lustful killer, pursued by every conceivable means, reviled with such savage vehemence that nothing short of wholesale extirpation was imaginable. Today, the symbolic power of the wolf remains while our perception of the animal, as well as ourselves, has vastly changed.That such a transformation was ever possible at all is the ultimate triumph of wolf recovery.”

“Deer needed predators to trim their numbers and keep them from destroying their environment, he said. To do away with predators such as wolves was tantamount to "ecological murder," with far-reaching consequences both to deer and their habitat. "I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.”

“Writing to A. Brazier Howell, Murie admitted that he had grown "very fond of native mammals, amounting almost to a passion," and thought of the wolf as a "noble animal, with admirable cunning and strength.”