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

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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
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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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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
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Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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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 outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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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.
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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
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We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
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Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.
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That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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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!
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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