Aldo Leopold Wilderness Quotes & Sayings

Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us. — Aldo Leopold

Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism. — Aldo Leopold

Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness. — Aldo Leopold

If we lose our wilderness , we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me. — Aldo Leopold

Fare thee well/ A fiend like thee might bear my soul to hell. — William Shakespeare

You aren't staying in heaven because you still need to purify the mind. Your faith is powerful, but it is invested in what you believe you are, and most of what you believe about yourself is a lie. — Miguel Angel Ruiz

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander. — Aldo Leopold

Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health. — Aldo Leopold

For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master? — Aldo Leopold

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise. — Aldo Leopold

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

Besides all that, she's hilarious and warm and knows when I need a hug, and just how long the hug needs to be for me to not feel like crying anymore. — Tyler Oakley

Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely — Arnold Bennett

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. — Aldo Leopold

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 — 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

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. — Aldo Leopold

Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of. — Aldo Leopold

Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say 'yes' to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared. — Aldo Leopold

Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old. — Aldo Leopold

I don't ride the subway. Either I walk, or I take a New York City taxi. — Nina Garcia

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future. — Aldo Leopold

The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms. — Dick Morris

Now the motif was clear. This trip was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were 'on their own' in this particular sense. — Aldo Leopold

He was always thinking of his brother's soul, or of the souls of those who differed with him in opinion: it is a sort of comfort which many of the serious give themselves. — William Makepeace Thackeray

My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead. — Leela Corman

Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man. — Aldo Leopold

I like having that juxtaposition where you can have a very triumphant sounding song and then throw in all this crazy imagery. That's part of the fun of writing, you know? — Brendon Urie

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wilderness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men. — Aldo Leopold

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

He [Aldo Leopold] recognized that industrial-age tools were incompatible with truly wild country - that roads eventually brought with them streams of tourists and settlers, hotels and gas stations, summer homes and cabins, and a diminishment of land health. He sort of invented the concept of wilderness as we now understand it in America: a stretch of country without roads, where all human movement must happen on foot or horseback. He understood that to keep a little remnant of our continent wild, we had no choice but to exercise restraint. I think it's one of the best ideas our culture ever had, not to mention our best hope for preserving the full diversity of nonhuman life in a few functioning ecosystems. — Philip Connors

Britain has a lot of wind. It's our wind. We don't have to import it. — Edward Davey

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

A vacancy in the heart does not accomodate itself to a stop-gap. — Victor Hugo

That's why we all play the game. You want to be a player; you want to be out there to play. — Jimmy Garoppolo

I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment. — Aldo Leopold

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

Women; the supreme masters of the bait and switch.
D'Artagnan Bloodhawke — D'Artagnan Bloodhawke