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

Aldo Leopold Quotes

Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over the rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it- a vast pulsing harmony- its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

— Aldo Leopold

I sit in happy meditation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook.

— Aldo Leopold

He is the prospector of the air, perpetually searching its strata for olfactory gold.

— Aldo Leopold

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

— 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

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

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

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

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

— Aldo Leopold

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

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind. Wildlife in American Culture The culture of primitive peoples is often based on wildlife.

— Aldo Leopold

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

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

— Aldo Leopold

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

— Aldo Leopold

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

— Aldo Leopold

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

That wildlife is merely something to shoot at or to look at is the grossest of fallacies.

— Aldo Leopold

To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.

— Aldo Leopold

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

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

— Aldo Leopold
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