"The Best Idea We Ever Had" Marking the Sparrow's Fall: The Making of the American West, page 137
“If the national park idea is the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.”
It All Began with Conservation Smithsonian magazine, April 1990, pages 35-43
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Wallace Stegner 29
American historian, writer, and environmentalist 1909–1993Related quotes

The 125th Anniversary Jubilee Lecture, St. Stephen's College, Delhi, November 12 2005, "India: from Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond" Available Online http://www.shashitharoor.com/books/midnight/lecture.html
2000s

“Because it's the best idea ever invented in the history of the world!”
Russell T. Davies, responding to the question, "Why do you think people love Doctor Who so much?" on BBC Wales Today (20 July 2004)

“A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”
Definitions, iii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
“The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.”
"Shadows from the Big Woods", p. 223
The Journey Home (1977)

“Events enlarged his embrace to a wholly new idea of nation — the United States of America.”
"At Large", speech at the Peace Corps twenty-fifth anniversary memorial service (21 September 1986), published in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 26
Context: nowiki>[George Washington] in uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life — one's own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough. Events enlarged his embrace to a wholly new idea of nation — the United States of America. But less than a century later his descendant by marriage could not slip the more parochial tether. In the halls of the family home standing on the hill above us, General Robert E. Lee paced back and forth as he weighed the offer of Abraham Lincoln to take command of the Union Army on the eve of the Civil War. Lee turned the offer down and that evening took the train to Richmond. His country was still Virginia. We struggle today with the imperative of a new patriotism and citizenship. The Peace Corps has been showing us the way, and the volunteers and staff whom we honor this morning are the vanguard of that journey.

Column, May 7, 2014, "Thin skins and legislative prayer" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-thin-skins-and-prayer-in-supreme-court-case/2014/05/07/a5049a64-d54c-11e3-8a78-8fe50322a72c_story.html at washingtonpost.com.
2010s

PENN Address (2004)
Context: America is an idea, but it's an idea that brings with it some baggage, like power brings responsibility. It's an idea that brings with it equality, but equality even though it's the highest calling, is the hardest to reach. The idea that anything is possible, that's one of the reasons why I'm a fan of America. It's like hey, look there's the moon up there, lets take a walk on it, bring back a piece of it. That's the kind of America that I'm a fan of.

“An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol.”
Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IX