Aldo Leopold quotes

Aldo Leopold was an American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist, best known for his pioneering work in wildlife conservation. His book, "A Sand County Almanac," has inspired generations to value and protect the natural world. He is widely regarded as the father of wildlife management and modern environmental ethics. Here are 137 of his quotes:

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

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

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

Aldo Leopold

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

Aldo Leopold

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

Aldo Leopold

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

Aldo Leopold

In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.

Aldo Leopold

The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.

Aldo Leopold

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

Aldo Leopold

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

Aldo Leopold

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

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

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

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

Aldo Leopold

Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.

Aldo Leopold

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

Aldo Leopold

It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.

Aldo Leopold

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

Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.

Aldo Leopold

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

Aldo Leopold

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

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