Aldo Leopold quotes

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. (Aldo Leopold)
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
Aldo Leopold
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Aldo Leopold
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
Aldo Leopold
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.
Aldo Leopold
Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
Aldo Leopold
Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .
Aldo Leopold
In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.
Aldo Leopold
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
Aldo Leopold
The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
Aldo Leopold
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (Aldo Leopold)
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
Aldo Leopold
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.
Aldo Leopold
I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
Aldo Leopold
Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
Aldo Leopold
No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
Aldo Leopold
Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
Aldo Leopold
Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
Aldo Leopold
It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
Aldo Leopold
Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
Aldo Leopold
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. (Aldo Leopold)
Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.
Aldo Leopold
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
Aldo Leopold
Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.
Aldo Leopold
How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
Aldo Leopold