Aldo Leopold

"The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise."

"In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future, and bond to each other."

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."

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

"We abuse land because we see 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 are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot."

"The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television or radio, but the complexity of land."

"Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow."

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

"The trouble with replacing halftone with halftone is that in the end you will have nothing but halftone."

"If you own land, you will want to know the history of your property."

"When we destroy a species, we destroy one page of the book of life."

"To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."

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

"Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest."

"The land ethic reflects the existence of an ecological conscience."

"We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of eons we destroy at will."

"A sand county is a place of unseen things; it is a place where the ordinary becomes extraordinary."

"Wilderness values may be unknown, but that does not mean they are nonexistent."

"The most important characteristic of an American is that he does something about the things he does not like, rather than sit and complain."

"Thinking like a mountain teaches us that immediate self-interest is not always the path to long-term stability."

"The land is tired; man must rest it, understand it, and work with it."

"If there is value in philosophical speculation concerning how we ought to live, there is equal value in the effort to live as we ought."

"An ethical relationship to the land is dependent upon an emotional relationship."

"Civilization is not, as they sometimes seem to suppose, the enslavement of a stable and peaceful man-nature relationship by unstable and violent people in the name of progress."

"We grieve only for what we know."

"The quality of creed is known by its capacity to breed action."

"A profound change in the relation of individual to society is one of the most profound manifestations of maturity."

"Our tools have become too sharp for our vision; we can crack the atom but not adjust our ethics to our power."