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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.

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
Values
Expands
Language
Stages
Art
Perceive
Nature
Begins
Beautiful
Pretty
Stage
Quality
Ability
Successive

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
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Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.
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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.
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Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
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The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose
Aldo Leopold
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A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
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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. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
Aldo Leopold
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On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.
Aldo Leopold
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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
Aldo Leopold
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
Aldo Leopold
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There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.
Aldo Leopold
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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. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Aldo Leopold
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There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
Aldo Leopold
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The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
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Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold