One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.

The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy - it is already too late for that - but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

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

We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.