Aldo Leopold Quotes
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Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.
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Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.
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Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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After describing a hopper for feeding winter game: If you think you're too old to enjoy building such contraptions - that only Boy Scouts get a kick out of such nonsense - just try it. You may end up by building several.
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Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
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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.
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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
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But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.
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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.
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Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs.
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Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
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Engineers did not discover insulation: they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war.
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It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them.
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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, unknowingly. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.