Quote

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

Aldo Leopold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Right
Even
Thing
Legal
Ethical
Watching
Behavior
Wrong
Else

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

Image
Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing.
Aldo Leopold
Image
If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
Aldo Leopold
Image
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .
Aldo Leopold
Image
For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress our opponents do not.
Aldo Leopold
Image
For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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
Image
I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.
Aldo Leopold
Image
What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Aldo Leopold
Image
How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
Aldo Leopold
Image
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say 'yes' to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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