Aldo Leopold

If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

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 [Passenger] 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?

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them

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

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.

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

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

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!

Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage.

Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.

There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than _x000D_ one rooted in pavements.

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.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?

The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose

Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.