Aldo Leopold Quotes

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

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

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

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

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.

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.

The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.

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.

We realize the indivisibility of the earth – its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals – and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space – a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young.