Quotes by Aldo Leopold

“All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

“But I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our God and our consciences, for which we were accountable to him, and not to the priests. I never told my own religion, nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change anothers creed. I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives, and by this test, my dear Madam, I have been satisfied yours must be an excellent one, to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me.”

“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.”

“Parents, teach your children to express themselves. Teach them to be in touch with their emotions, to speak honestly to people, and to maintain integrity and stick by their principles in all they do. This is perhaps the highest morality you can instill. But dont expect them to succeed in business.”

“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.”

“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”

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

“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering”

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.”

“Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.”

“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.”

“Mark this well, the laws of economics are the last thing the roads booster is thinking about”

“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.