Aldo Leopold Quotes

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

What a dull world if we knew all about geese!

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

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

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.

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.

Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
[Also known as:]I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.

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.