Top 200 Aldo Leopold Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

152. “We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.”

— Aldo Leopold

153. “I feel a deep sense of security in this single-mindedness of freight trains.”

— Aldo Leopold

154. “What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.”

— Aldo Leopold

155. “A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.”

— Aldo Leopold

156. “O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me.”

— Aldo Leopold

157. “At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.”

— Aldo Leopold

158. “The months of the year, from January up to June, are a geometric progression in the abundance of distractions.”

— Aldo Leopold

159. “There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.”

— Aldo Leopold

160. “These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live. 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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.”

— Aldo Leopold

164. “Unsportsmanlike predator-killing is always rationalized as defence of property – usually someone else’s property. This excuse is getting too thin to pass muster among thinking conservationists.”

— Aldo Leopold

165. “There are degrees and kinds of solitude. An island in a lake has one kind; but lakes have boats, and there is always the chance that one might land to pay you a visit. A peak in the clouds has another kind; but most peaks have trails, and trails have tourists. 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

166. “There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.”

— Aldo Leopold

167. “Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.”

— Aldo Leopold

168. “The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.”

— Aldo Leopold

169. “The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.”

— Aldo Leopold

170. “Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.”

— Aldo Leopold

171. “The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.”

— Aldo Leopold

172. “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

173. “Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.”

— Aldo Leopold

174. “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

175. “But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.”

— Aldo Leopold

176. “Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry – lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an ‘exercise’ undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty.”

— Aldo Leopold

177. “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... The land is one organism.”

— Aldo Leopold

178. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

179. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.”

— Aldo Leopold

180. “By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.”

— Aldo Leopold

181. “If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not...”

— Aldo Leopold

182. “Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to perserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

— Aldo Leopold

183. “Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .”

— Aldo Leopold

184. “Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles.”

— Aldo Leopold

185. “When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread.”

— Aldo Leopold

186. “Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.”

— Aldo Leopold

187. “The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.”

— Aldo Leopold

188. “Our lumber pile, recruited entirely from the river, is thus not only a collection of personalities, but an anthology of human strivings in upriver farms and forests. The autobiography of an old board is a kind of literature not yet taught on campuses, but any riverbank farm is a library where he who hammers or saws may read at will. Come high water, there is always an accession of new books.”

— Aldo Leopold

189. “During every week from April to September there are, on the average, ten wild plants coming into first bloom.”

— Aldo Leopold

190. “Black and white buffalo pass in and out of red barns, offering free rides to itinerant atoms.”

— Aldo Leopold

191. “There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.”

— Aldo Leopold

192. “Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.”

— Aldo Leopold

193. “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 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

194. “The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process.”

— Aldo Leopold

195. “Everything on this farm spells money in the bank. The farmstead abounds in fresh paint, steel, and concrete. A date on the barn commemorates the founding fathers. The roof bristles with lightning rods, the weathercock is proud with new gilt. Even the pigs look solvent.”

— Aldo Leopold

196. “A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward.”

— Aldo Leopold

197. “I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.”

— Aldo Leopold

198. “I am well content that it should remain a mystery. What a dull world if we knew all about geese.”

— Aldo Leopold

199. “The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse.”

— Aldo Leopold

200. “It seems timely, therefore, to segregate the components, and to examine the distinctive characteristics or properties of each.”

— Aldo Leopold