Quote

Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

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
Live
Piece
Crack
Human
Tools
Tides
Humans
Pieces
Cracks
Without
Grow
Atoms
Land
Task
Spoiling
Grows
Command
Suffice
History
Faster
Oldest
Better
Tasks
Atom

More quotes by 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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...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 console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
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There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
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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
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
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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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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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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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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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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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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
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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.
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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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Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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