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.Aldo Leopold
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.Aldo Leopold
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.Aldo Leopold
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.Aldo Leopold
In wildness is the preservation of the worldAldo Leopold
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.Aldo Leopold
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.Aldo Leopold
An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence.Aldo Leopold
A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [he] is writing his signature on the face of the land.Aldo Leopold
I love all soils of earth except the soil of the human mindAldo Leopold
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.Aldo Leopold
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy itAldo Leopold