Quotes by Aldo Leopold

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

“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.”

“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. ...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.”

“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.”

“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.”

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

“We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.”

“When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among ad...”

“It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.”

“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.”

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

“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 pr...”

“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 th...”

“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...”

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”