Quote

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.

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
Cannot
Wild
Find
Flower
Live
Speech
Without
Television
Right
Chance
Inalienable
Important
Free
Geese
Things
Opportunity
Minority
Nature
Minorities

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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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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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
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When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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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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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
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That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
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Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel.
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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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Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
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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.
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