Top 100 Aldo Leopold Quotes
#1. Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
Aldo Leopold
#2. 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, A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold
#3. 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
#4. Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
Aldo Leopold
#5. That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our
best.
Aldo Leopold
#6. We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
Aldo Leopold
#7. The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.
Aldo Leopold
#8. I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
Aldo Leopold
#9. The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.
Aldo Leopold
#10. There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than
one rooted in pavements.
Aldo Leopold
#11. Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
Aldo Leopold
#12. 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.
Aldo Leopold
#13. I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
Aldo Leopold
#14. The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
Aldo Leopold
#15. Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.
Aldo Leopold
#16. Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say 'yes' to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared.
Aldo Leopold
#17. 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
#18. Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
Aldo Leopold
#19. The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.
Aldo Leopold
#20. Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow ... creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
Aldo Leopold
#21. To any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
Aldo Leopold
#22. 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.
Aldo Leopold
#23. For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
Aldo Leopold
#24. A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
Aldo Leopold
#25. Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear.
Aldo Leopold
#26. The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
Aldo Leopold
#27. A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.
Aldo Leopold
#28. No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
Aldo Leopold
#29. Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?
Aldo Leopold
#30. Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
Aldo Leopold
#31. At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
Aldo Leopold
#32. The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
Aldo Leopold
#33. 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
#34. The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
Aldo Leopold
#35. All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
Aldo Leopold
#36. 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.
Aldo Leopold
#37. There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
Aldo Leopold
#38. Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
Aldo Leopold
#39. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
Aldo Leopold
#40. There are some of us who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese or wild flowers is a right as inalienable as free speech.
Aldo Leopold
#41. 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.
Aldo Leopold
#42. 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
#43. There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.
Aldo Leopold
#44. The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
Aldo Leopold
#45. The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on ... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.
Aldo Leopold
#46. The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that the grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks, and that snow falls in order that mice may build subways from stack to stack ...
Aldo Leopold
#47. Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
Aldo Leopold
#48. To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.
Aldo Leopold
#50. 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.
Aldo Leopold
#51. The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.
Aldo Leopold
#52. 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
#53. In wildness is the salvation of the world,
Aldo Leopold
#54. The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
Aldo Leopold
#55. He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
Aldo Leopold
#56. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
Aldo Leopold
#57. Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
Aldo Leopold
#58. No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
Aldo Leopold
#59. Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
Aldo Leopold
#60. Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.
Aldo Leopold
#63. Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
Aldo Leopold
#64. Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
Aldo Leopold
#65. Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
Aldo Leopold
#66. What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
Aldo Leopold
#67. In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
Aldo Leopold
#68. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
Aldo Leopold
#69. 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
#70. Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
Aldo Leopold
#71. Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to the land
Aldo Leopold
#72. Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .
Aldo Leopold
#73. I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
Aldo Leopold
#74. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to perserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Aldo Leopold
#75. There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
Aldo Leopold
#76. There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
Aldo Leopold
#77. 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.
Aldo Leopold
#79. It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.
Aldo Leopold
#80. Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run,
Aldo Leopold
#81. 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.
Aldo Leopold
#82. We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
Aldo Leopold
#83. Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
Aldo Leopold
#84. To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
Aldo Leopold
#85. The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.
Aldo Leopold
#86. Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.
Aldo Leopold
#87. 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.
Aldo Leopold
#88. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
Aldo Leopold
#89. Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.
Aldo Leopold
#90. Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.
Aldo Leopold
#91. A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
Aldo Leopold
#92. The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.
Aldo Leopold
#93. We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
Aldo Leopold
#94. 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?
Aldo Leopold
#95. The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose
Aldo Leopold
#96. Never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude top spend it in.
Aldo Leopold
#97. Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
Aldo Leopold
#98. Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.
Aldo Leopold
#99. It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines ... a curious transfusion of courage.
Aldo Leopold
#100. In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
Aldo Leopold
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
