Top 200 Aldo Leopold Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.”

— Aldo Leopold

52. “We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.”

— Aldo Leopold

53. “A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct.”

— Aldo Leopold

54. “Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.”

— Aldo Leopold

55. “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

56. “What a dull world if we knew all about geese!”

— Aldo Leopold

57. “No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two birds enough. I must be sure that, come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.”

— Aldo Leopold

58. “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.”

— Aldo Leopold

59. “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”

— Aldo Leopold

60. “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.”

— Aldo Leopold

61. “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

62. “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.”

— Aldo Leopold

63. “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

64. “An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.”

— Aldo Leopold

65. “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 from human view. After that it exists only in my mind’s eye.”

— Aldo Leopold

66. “The rich diversity of the world’s cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.”

— Aldo Leopold

67. “For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.”

— Aldo Leopold

68. “I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.”

— Aldo Leopold

69. “Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.”

— Aldo Leopold

70. “Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear.”

— Aldo Leopold

71. “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?”

— Aldo Leopold

72. “Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.”

— Aldo Leopold

73. “There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.”

— Aldo Leopold

74. “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

75. “That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”

— Aldo Leopold

76. “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”

— Aldo Leopold

77. “It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.”

— Aldo Leopold

78. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

79. “Thus always does history, whether or marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

— Aldo Leopold

80. “Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.”

— Aldo Leopold

81. “Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.”

— Aldo Leopold

82. “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

83. “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

84. “The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.”

— Aldo Leopold

85. “Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.”

— Aldo Leopold

86. “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

87. “What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one’s own land?”

— Aldo Leopold

88. “I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.”

— Aldo Leopold

89. “We Americans, in most states at least, have not yet experienced a bear-less, eagle-less, cat- less, wolf-less woods. Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game and got neither.”

— Aldo Leopold

90. “Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over the rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it- a vast pulsing harmony- its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”

— Aldo Leopold

91. “Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?”

— Aldo Leopold

92. “How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.”

— Aldo Leopold

93. “Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land – health.”

— Aldo Leopold

94. “He is the prospector of the air, perpetually searching its strata for olfactory gold.”

— Aldo Leopold

95. “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

96. “Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to the land.”

— Aldo Leopold

97. “There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.”

— Aldo Leopold

98. “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

99. “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

100. “I sit in happy mediation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. 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! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook. Even so, I think there is some virtue to eagerness, whether its object prove true or false. How utterly dull would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world!”

— Aldo Leopold