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Aldo Leopold Quotes | Quotes said by Aldo Leopold

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #1

    A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.


  • Aldo Leopold Quote #2

    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 lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that 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. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #3

    Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #4

    Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #5

    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 Quote #6

    Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #7

    Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #8

    Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators... The land is one organism.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #9

    I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

    Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    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?

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #14

    No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #15

    One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodge-podge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #16

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

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #17

    One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #20

    That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That lands yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #21

    The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy – it is already too late for that – but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #22

    The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

    There is an allegory for historians in the diverse functions of saw, wedge, and axe.

    The saw works only across the years, which it must deal with one by one, in sequence. From each year the raker teeth pull little chips of fact, which accumulate in little piles, called sawdust by woodsmen and archives by historians; both judge the character of what lies within by the character of the samples thus made visible without. It is not until the transect is complete that the tree falls, and the stump yields a collective view of the century. By its fall the tree attests the unity of the hodge-podge called history.

    The wedge on the other hand, works only in radial splits; such a split yields a collective view of all the years at once, or no view at all, depending on the skill with which the plane of the split is chosen[...]

    The axe functions only at an angle diagonal to the years, and this is only for the peripheral rings of the recent past. Its special function is to lop limbs, for which both the saw and wedge are useless.

    The three tools are requisite to good oak, and to good history.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #28

    They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #29

    This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations

  • Aldo Leopold Quote #30

    To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

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