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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.

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
Return
Durable
Single
Returns
Point
Organize
Values
Consists
History
Scale
Another
Scales
Men
Search
Excursions
Starting
Successive

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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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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On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.
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Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
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An oak is no respecter of persons.
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The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
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Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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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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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.
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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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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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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
Aldo Leopold
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
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Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing.
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He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
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