Leopold Quotes

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals. ~ Aldo Leopold

Top of the Shitberg
The first small turds that come out of you after getting stuffed on Indian or Mexican food.
You're thinking, 'Is that it?' and a minute later the Mt. Everest of shit comes out of your ass - requiring two courtesy flushes followed by a plunger.

Alternate meaning: A popular greeting among Jews living in Edwardian Dublin, when they met an the synagogue for morning services ~
'Top of the shitberg to you, Seamus Goldberg.'
'And a top of the shitberg to you, Leopold Bloom. ~ Beryl Dov

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a "scenic" area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has "outgrown ~ Aldo Leopold

Dangerous forces lie within me. You awaken them, and not to your advantage. You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind. ~ Aldo Leopold

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

Investigative superstar Jason Leopold spares no one, least of all himself, in this devastatingly accurate first-hand exposé. News Junkie provides the best account so far of how, and why, current American journalism has become so pharisaical, spineless, and detached from the truth ~ T.D. Allman

At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. ~ Aldo Leopold

To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants - a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense. ~ Aldo Leopold

Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

What is a hobby anyway? Where is the line of demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits? I have been unable to answer this question to my own satisfaction. At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby... Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.

This, however, is serious: Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry–lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an 'exercise' undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbel ~ Aldo Leopold

My wife is really sentimental. One Valentine's Day I gave her a ring and to this day she has never forgotten those three little words that were engraved inside Made in Taiwan! ~ Leopold Fechtner

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind. ~ Aldo Leopold

The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education. ~ Aldo Leopold

I sit in happy mediation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook. Even so, I think there is some virtue to eagerness, whether its object prove true or false. How utterly dull would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world! ~ Aldo Leopold

Author:
A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape with wanton disregard. His days are spent picking up all the stray free words he can handle and squirreling them away for later use.
Subsequently, (days, months or years later) working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture.
Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit. ~ Leopold Throckmorton

The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man's doing. ~ Leopold Kronecker

An oak is no respecter of persons. ~ Aldo Leopold

They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all. ~ Aldo Leopold

Leopold, like most men of power and prestige, was not so much interested in listening to what others had to say as he was in having an audience. ~ Jeremy Robinson

The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry. ~ Leopold Schefer

Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land. ~ Aldo Leopold

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

Frighteningly honest. What Anthony Bourdain did to the world of cooking in Kitchen Confidential, Leopold will do to the world of journalism. It's Sid & Nancy meets All the President's Men. ~ Rob Cohen

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

I told my broker that as long as he doesn't tell me where my money should go, I won't tell him where he should go. ~ Leopold Fechtner

What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep, this poet's desert, this pain of living, this dying of not dying, this anguish of shadows, this passion over death and light. ~ Leopold Sedar Senghor

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was. ~ Leopold Von Ranke

The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life. ~ Leopold Sedar Senghor

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost. ~ Aldo Leopold

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology. ~ Leopold Von Ranke

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Now her eyes meet mine like green lightning-they are green, these eyes of hers, whose power is so indescribable-green, but as are precious stones, or deep unfathomable mountain lakes. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. ~ Aldo Leopold

We forest officers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a dagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado´s captains. We spoke harshly of the Spaniards, who, in their zeal for gold and converts, had needlessly extinguished the native Indians. It did not occur to us that we, too, were the captains of an invasion too sure of its righteousness. ~ Aldo Leopold

Number theorists are like lotus-eaters
having once tasted of this food they can never give it up. ~ Leopold Kronecker

Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal. ~ Aldo Leopold

The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people. ~ Aldo Leopold

Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls - it wouldn't matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone's loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation zloty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls. ~ Thomas Keneally

Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. ~ Aldo Leopold

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking. ~ Aldo Leopold

The thumb does not have very a important role when shifting from one position to another. There is too much said, as it seems to me, about importance of the thumb ... The thumb must lightly touch the neck and follow the forefinger when moving in different positions, aiding the hand to shift up and down without clutching the instrument. ~ Leopold Auer

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land. ~ Aldo Leopold

On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh. ~ Aldo Leopold

Music comes from the heart and returns to the heart ... music is spontaneous, impulsive expression ... its range is without limit ... forever growing ... can be one element to help us build a new conception of life in which the madness and cruelty of wars will be replaced by a simple understanding of the brotherhood of man. ~ Leopold Stokowski

Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky. ~ Aldo Leopold

I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey. ~ Aldo Leopold

I can easily imagine belonging to one man for my entire life, but he would have to be a whole man, a man who would dominate me, who would subjugate me by his inate strength. And every man - I know this very well - as soon as he falls in love becomes weak, pliable, ridiculous. He puts himself into the woman's hands, kneels down before her. The only man whom I could love permanently would be he before whom I should have to kneel. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

I believe in a passionately strong feeling for the poetry of life - for the beautiful, the mysterious, the romantic, the ecstatic - the loveliness of Nature, the lovability of people, everything that excites us, everything that starts our imagination working, LAUGHTER, gaiety, strength, heroism, love, tenderness, every time we see - however dimly - the godlike that is in everyone and want to kneel in reverence. ~ Leopold Stokowski

My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land ... In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such. ~ Aldo Leopold

Music appeals to me for what can be done with it. ~ Leopold Stokowski

He simply painted the portrait of some aristocratic Mesalina, and was tactful enough to let Cupid hold the mirror in which she tests her majestic allure with cold satisfaction. He looks as though his task were becoming burdensome enough. The picture is painted flattery. Later an 'expert' in the Rococo period baptized the lady with the name of Venus. The furs of the despot in which Titian's fair model wrapped herself, probably more for fear of a cold than out of modesty, have become a symbol of the tyranny and cruelty that constitute woman's essence and her beauty. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

You view love and especially women ... as something hostile, something against which you defend yourself, although in vain, something whose power over you, however, you feel as a sweet torment, a prickling cruelty: this is truly a modern attitude. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map? ~ Aldo Leopold

The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not. ~ Aldo Leopold

In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined. ~ Leopold Von Ranke

A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Having told the truth for years as a first-rate reporter, Jason Leopold now comes completely clean about himself and also sheds light on his imperiled profession. A riveting account of just how hard the truth can be. ~ Mark Crispin Miller

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? ~ Aldo Leopold

That dark laboratory we call the soil. ~ Aldo Leopold

We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in. ~ Aldo Leopold

Woman, as Nature has created her and as she is currently reared by man, is his enemy and can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. She will be able to become his companion only when she has the same rights as he, when she is his equal in education and work. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

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

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. ~ Aldo Leopold

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm. ~ Aldo Leopold

Be then my slave, and know what it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

A perversion must be baptized and patronized (the Marquis De Sade and Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch were on to something). ~ Philippe Lejeune

It must be good to die in Toronto. The transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable in this silent town. I dreaded the Sundays and prayed to God that if he chose for me to die in Toronto, he would let it be on a Saturday afternoon to save me from one more Toronto Sunday. ~ Leopold Infeld

You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better known as Operation Barbarossa. ~ Leopold Trepper

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. ~ Aldo Leopold

The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land. ~ 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

But you cannot deny, that man and woman are mortal enemies, in your serene sunlit world as well as in our foggy one. In love there is union into a single being for a short time only, capable of only one thought, one sensation, one will, in order to be then further disunited. And you know this better than I; whichever of the two fails to subjugate will soon feel the feet of the other on his neck - ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy. ~ Aldo Leopold

Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of [Passenger] pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring? ~ Aldo Leopold

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. ~ Aldo Leopold

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

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one. ~ Aldo Leopold

Art is animated by invisible forces that rule the universe. ~ Leopold Sedar Senghor

Aldo Leopold taught her that floodplains are living extensions of the rivers, which will claim them back any time they choose. Anyone living on a floodplain is just waiting in the river's wings. ~ Delia Owens

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 yet a profession. ~ Aldo Leopold

I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition. (Said to Leopold Mozart) ~ Joseph Haydn

He who closes his eyes sees nothing, even in the full light of day. ~ Leopold Trepper

Every man
I know this
turns weak, pliant, ridiculous as soon as he's in love. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

But one on earth is better than the wife; that is the mother. ~ Leopold Schefer

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. ~ Aldo Leopold

Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to the land ~ Aldo Leopold

Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage. ~ Aldo Leopold

When I speak of knowledge of nature, I do not mean industrial science, which argues that nature is inert and can be understood only to enable humans to manipulate it. I mean that sense of nature that Aldo Leopold had in mind when he said, A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, wrong when it tends otherwise. ~ Kirkpatrick Sale

Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education. ~ Aldo Leopold

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped,
deserves to be whipped. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. ~ Aldo Leopold

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers
if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why. ~ Aldo Leopold

I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Why become well-versed in science and the arts if not to impress a lovely little woman? ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Each time thou wishest to decide upon performing some enterprise, raise the eyes to heaven, pray God to bless thy project; if thou canst make that prayer, accomplish thy work. ~ Leopold Schefer

A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity. ~ Aldo Leopold

Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches. ~ Aldo Leopold