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The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.

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
Measured
Clean
Record
Cause
Records
Blots
Causes
Worthiness
Change
Readiness
Mind
Pointed

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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
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How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
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In wildness is the salvation of the world.
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To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.
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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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We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
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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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O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me
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Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.
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But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
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A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
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Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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