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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
Thing
Higher
Never
Achieve
People
Liberty
Aspirations
Shall
Aspiration
Land
Absolutes
Justice
Absolute
Nature
Strive
Important
Harmony

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
Aldo Leopold
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An oak is no respecter of persons.
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Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
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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.
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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.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
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If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
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How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
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A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
Aldo Leopold
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.
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In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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