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

Aldo Leopold

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Aldo Leopold
Age: 60 †
Born: 1887
Born: January 1
Died: 1948
Died: January 1
Academic
Author
Botanical Collector
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Forestry Scientist
Naturalist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Burlington
Iowa
Aldo Starker Leopold
Rand Aldo Leopold
Important
Harmony
Thing
Higher
Never
Achieve
People
Liberty
Aspirations
Shall
Aspiration
Land
Absolutes
Justice
Absolute
Nature
Strive

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
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What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
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We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
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We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
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Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
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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.
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I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
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Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
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Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
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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.
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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
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At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
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Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
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There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
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Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
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