Top 200 Aldo Leopold Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”

— Aldo Leopold

2. “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

— Aldo Leopold

3. “It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.”

— Aldo Leopold

4. “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

— Aldo Leopold

5. “Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.”

— Aldo Leopold

6. “The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”

— Aldo Leopold

7. “I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”

— Aldo Leopold

8. “The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.”

— Aldo Leopold

9. “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

10. “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

— Aldo Leopold

11. “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.”

— Aldo Leopold

12. “Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.”

— Aldo Leopold

13. “Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.”

— Aldo Leopold

14. “There are some of us who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese or wild flowers is a right as inalienable as free speech.”

— Aldo Leopold

15. “To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul – hope you like what you see.”

— Aldo Leopold

16. “The landscape of any farm is the owner’s portrait of himself.”

— Aldo Leopold

17. “Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation’s character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.”

— Aldo Leopold

18. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

19. “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.”

— Aldo Leopold

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20. “There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”

— Aldo Leopold

21. “Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”

— Aldo Leopold

22. “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”

— Aldo Leopold

23. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

24. “To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.”

— Aldo Leopold

25. “I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.”

— Aldo Leopold

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.”

— Aldo Leopold

29. “What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

— Aldo Leopold

30. “A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.”

— Aldo Leopold

31. “There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.”

— Aldo Leopold

32. “If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.”

— Aldo Leopold

33. “Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.”

— Aldo Leopold

34. “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

— Aldo Leopold

35. “To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

— Aldo Leopold

36. “Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”

— Aldo Leopold

37. “If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.”

— Aldo Leopold

38. “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

39. “Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.”

— Aldo Leopold

40. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

41. “Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.”

— Aldo Leopold

42. “The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”

— Aldo Leopold

43. “We face the question whether a still higher “standard of living” is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.”

— Aldo Leopold

44. “Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.”

— Aldo Leopold

45. “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

46. “Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.”

— Aldo Leopold

47. “The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.”

— Aldo Leopold

48. “That dark laboratory we call the soil.”

— Aldo Leopold

49. “Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.”

— Aldo Leopold

50. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

— Aldo Leopold