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We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.

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
Strive
Safety
Comfort
Long
Life
Dullness
Prosperity

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
Aldo Leopold
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Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
Aldo Leopold
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I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
Aldo Leopold
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There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
Aldo Leopold
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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
Aldo Leopold
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Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
Aldo Leopold
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Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
Aldo Leopold
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When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind I have no hope for conservation born of fear.
Aldo Leopold
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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
Aldo Leopold
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Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
Aldo Leopold
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It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
Aldo Leopold
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To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.
Aldo Leopold
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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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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel.
Aldo Leopold