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

— Aldo Leopold

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries no man can ignore all of them.

— Aldo Leopold

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

— Aldo Leopold

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

— Aldo Leopold

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?

— Aldo Leopold

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

— Aldo Leopold

One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings' sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodgepodge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century.

— Aldo Leopold

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

— Aldo Leopold

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

— Aldo Leopold

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 captured by language.

— Aldo Leopold