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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.

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
Read
Learn
Fear
Many
Things
Pleasant
Land

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress our opponents do not.
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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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Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.
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The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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There are degrees and kinds of solitude. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.
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For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.
Aldo Leopold
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A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
Aldo Leopold
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Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
Aldo Leopold
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To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste to others, the most valuable part.
Aldo Leopold
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I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
Aldo Leopold