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

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In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries no man can ignore all of them.
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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
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Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.
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Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
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He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
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There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.
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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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To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.
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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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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
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It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value I mean value in the philosophical sense.
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
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The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on.... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.
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Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.
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I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
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