Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

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!

There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.

Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.