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Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.

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
Legal
Ethical
Watching
Behavior
Wrong
Else
Right
Even

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...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
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We Americans, in most states at least, have not yet experienced a bear-less, eagle-less, cat- less, wolf-less woods. Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game and got neither.
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The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy - it is already too late for that - but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
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The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
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The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music and the preservation of some music to perceive.
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Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
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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.
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Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.
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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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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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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.
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He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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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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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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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.
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