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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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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 elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one.
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Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
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The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
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What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
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Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
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When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
Aldo Leopold
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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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.
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.
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.
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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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