"With the inevitable growth of population
that is sure to come, the importance of this territory lying in the heart of the metropolitan district must year by year grow, and the difficulties of obtaining a public ownership just as rapidly increase.", Charles Eliot and Sylvester Baxter in their report to the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners, 1896.

"The true Boston---geographical Boston, as distinguished from political Boston----comprises all that territory lying around the city which is covered by a compact mass of population, with social and business interests substantially identical. Nothing but a legal fiction stands in the way of its being known as such. The interests of this great metropolitan district now require that that fiction should disappear", Sylvester Baxter, Inventing the Charles River

The present condition of the Charles River is the natural product of the
peculiar character of the river and of the unintelligent treatment it has received." First Report of the Charles River Improvement Commission, 1891

"I hope that someday or other work of mine may give some human
being pleasure---pleasure of that helpful kind which beauty of music
and scenery gives me", Charles Eliot, age 24.

"The life history of humanity has proved nothing more clearly than that
crowded populations , if they would live in health and happiness, must
have space for air, for light, for exercise, for rest, and for the enjoyment
of that peaceful beauty of nature, which because it is the opposite of the
noisy ugliness of towns, is so wonderfully refreshing to the tired souls
of townspeople." Charles Eliot in arguing for the establishment of a
metropolitan park system, Inventing the Charles River