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Aldo Leopold Quotes
1887–1948 United States
Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) was a United States wildlife biologist and conservationist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has sold more than two million copies.
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Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.
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.
There are a few sections of uncut timber, luckily state-owned.
The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not.
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism.
Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and, being a professional naturalist, I agree.
What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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.
That biological jack-of-all-trades called ecologist tries to be and do all these things. Needless to say, he does not succeed.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
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.
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 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.
To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear. … To a rough-legged hawk, a thaw means freedom from want and fear.
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.
Engineers did not discover insulation: they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war.
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