Quote

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

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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
Shall
Folded
Full
Trout
Chance
Confess
Water
Double
Bigs
Fit
Three
Memory
Beheaded
None
Casket
Memories
Caskets

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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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A land ethic...reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.
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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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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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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
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All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.
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The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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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 .
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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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There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
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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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Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.
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Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
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There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
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Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
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Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
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