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

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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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.
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The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
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He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
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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. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
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Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say 'yes' to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared.
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If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
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The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
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Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
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A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Aldo Leopold
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Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
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There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
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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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Our children are our signature to the roster of history our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.
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An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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