Aldo Leopold Quotes

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

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes… What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations

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.

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.

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

Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.

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

Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.

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

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

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.