Aldo Leopold Quotes
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Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
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It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn day-breaks that one may hear the chorus of the quail. The silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come.
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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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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.
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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.
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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.
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To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear. … To a rough-legged hawk, a thaw means freedom from want and fear.
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The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
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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.
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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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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.
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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.
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For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
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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.
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That biological jack-of-all-trades called ecologist tries to be and do all these things. Needless to say, he does not succeed.
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The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not.
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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.
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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.
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There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. … Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.
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My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and, being a professional naturalist, I agree.