Aldo Leopold

Hunting for sport is an improvement over hunting for food, in that there has been added to the test of skill and ethical code, which the hunter formulates for himself, and must live up to without the moral support of bystanders.

We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.

Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.

The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.

Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than …

What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. … 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 …

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not …

Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs.

[After describing a hopper for feeding winter game:] If you think you're too old to enjoy building such contraptions — that only Boy Scouts get a kick out of such nonsense — just try it. You may end up by building several.

Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.

What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and, by cautious experimentation, to prove how it works? What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?

Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.

Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.

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

Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?

Our new camp is on a windswept rock point. … We don't know what lake we're on, and don't care ...

Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.