Aldo Leopold Quotes

An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.

Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.

...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.

Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.

In wildness is the salvation of the world.

Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.

The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.

Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.

There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.

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.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.

The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.

The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.

If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.

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.

An oak is no respecter of persons.

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.

Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.

To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.

Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.

O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me

Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.

Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.

That dark laboratory we call the soil.

Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.

We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses

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.

If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.

Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.

There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.

What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.

We Americans, in most states at least, have not yet experienced a bear-less, eagle-less, cat- less, wolf-less woods. Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game and got neither.

. . . perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.

No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.

No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.