Aldo Leopold Quotes

American writer and scientist (1887-1948)

Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) was a United States wildlife biologist and conservationist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has sold more than two million copies.

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Alternative Names: Aldo Starker Leopold • Rand Aldo Leopold

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Engineers did not discover insulation: they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war.

He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowingly. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.

There are degrees and kinds of solitude. … I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.

What a dull world if we knew all about geese!

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.

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

In that year 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.

An oak is no respecter of persons.

Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.

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.

To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear. … To a rough-legged hawk, a thaw means freedom from want and fear.

There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. 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. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.