Aldo Leopold Quotes

137 quotes in 1939 categories

• All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The…
• 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…
• Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
• Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.
• There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
• Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself,…
• No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
• 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…
• Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
• For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to…
• The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
• Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has…
• This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all.... On…
• 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.
• The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
• The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing…
• Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
• When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he…
• No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two birds…
• Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very…

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