Aldo Leopold quotes - page 3

There are degrees and kinds of solitude. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have. (Aldo Leopold)
An oak is no respecter of persons. View quote
Aldo Leopold
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost. View quote
Aldo Leopold
What a dull world if we knew all about geese! View quote
Aldo Leopold
Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild. View quote
Aldo Leopold
In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial. View quote
Aldo Leopold
A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact. View quote
Aldo Leopold
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written' ... it evolves in the minds of a thinking community. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree-and there will be one. View quote
Aldo Leopold
That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of [passenger] pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring? (Aldo Leopold)
We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. 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. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture. View quote
Aldo Leopold
What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and, by cautious experimentation, to prove how it works? What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land? View quote
Aldo Leopold
If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking. View quote
Aldo Leopold
A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. View quote
Aldo Leopold
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. View quote
Aldo Leopold
We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry. (Aldo Leopold)
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness. View quote
Aldo Leopold
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf. View quote
Aldo Leopold
All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish. View quote
Aldo Leopold
The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive. View quote
Aldo Leopold