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

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
Aldo Leopold
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Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
Aldo Leopold
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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
Aldo Leopold
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I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.
Aldo Leopold
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In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for 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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Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.
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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This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
Aldo Leopold
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Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
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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Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind I have no hope for conservation born of fear.
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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Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
Aldo Leopold