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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.

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
Quality
Ability
Art
Nature
Conservation
Perceive
Begins
Pretty

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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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.
Aldo Leopold
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There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
Aldo Leopold
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We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
Aldo Leopold
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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
Aldo Leopold
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I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
Aldo Leopold
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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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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
Aldo Leopold
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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.
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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There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
Aldo Leopold
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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
Aldo Leopold
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In wildness is the salvation of the world.
Aldo Leopold
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Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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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I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.
Aldo Leopold
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
Aldo Leopold
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To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
Aldo Leopold
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Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
Aldo Leopold