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Aldo Leopold

119 quotes

“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 (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What a dull world if we knew all about geese!”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are degrees and kinds of solitude. … I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowingly. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Engineers did not discover insulation: they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution. To the discerning eye, his farm is labeled with the badge and symbol of the prairie war.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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! … Even so, I think there is some virtue in eagerness, whether its object prove true or false.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One hundred and twenty acres, according to the County Clerk, is the extent of my worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a sleepy fellow, who never looks at his record books before nine o’clock. What they would show at daybreak is the question here at issue. Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“During every week from April to September there are, on the average, ten wild plants coming into first bloom. … No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. … Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless — to us — if we know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve only for what we know. The erasure of Silphium from western Dane County is no cause for grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some paintings become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes. I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn day-breaks that one may hear the chorus of the quail. The silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hunts differ in flavor, but the reasons are subtle. The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody’s nose.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and, being a professional naturalist, I agree.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We classify ourselves into vocations, each of which either wields some particular tool, or sells it, or repairs it, or sharpens it, or dispenses advice on how to do so; by such division of labors we avoid responsibility for the misuse of any tool save our own. But there is one vocation — philosophy — which knows that all men, by what they think about and wish for, in effect wield all tools. It knows that men thus determine, by their manner of thinking and wishing, whether it is worthwhile to wield any.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. … The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we hear [the crane’s] call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of [passenger] pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark. These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. … Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are a few sections of uncut timber, luckily state-owned.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On a fair morning the mountain invited you to get down and roll in its new grass and flowers (your less inhibited horse did just this if you failed to keep a tight rein). Every living thing sang, chirped, and burgeoned. Massive pines and firs, storm-tossed these many months, soaked up the sun in towering dignity. Tassel-eared squirrels, poker-faced but exuding emotion with voice and tail, told you insistently what your already knew full well: that never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude to spend it in.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The trophy-recreationist has peculiarities that contribute in subtle ways to his own undoing. To enjoy he must possess, invade, appropriate. Hence the wilderness that he cannot personally see has no value to him. Hence the universal assumption that an unused hinterland is rendering no service to society. To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren’t looking.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source