297 Quotes by Aldo Leopold

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.

To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants – a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.

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

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

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.

A man may not care for golf and still be human, but the man who does not like to see, hunt, photograph, or otherwise outwit birds or animals is hardly normal. He is supercivilized, and I for one do not know how to deal with him.

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

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

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