Aldo Leopold Quotes

I think my songs are singing to the rural heart. It's not whether you're from a big city or the middle of nowhere in a small town.

The first people, next after the Syrians and Jews, who occupy this country are husbandmen

The small land holders are the most precious part of a state.

I grew up in a small, rural community, where my extended family were mountain-folk type people, and some were very religious.

It was my dream to have a beauty parlour in our village and to live near my family in Sinjar.

There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is.

History shows that anything conducive to our national stability is good.

An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.

A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

Should I give up or should I just keep chasing pavement, even if it leads nowhere?

No one can doubt, that the convention for the distinction of property, and for the stability of possession, is of all circumstances the most necessary to the establishment of human society, and that after the agreement for the fixing and observing of this rule, there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord.

In my opinion, if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. If each person were given one quarter-acre, that is 1 1/4 acres to a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.

Optimism is a seed sown in the soil of faith; pessimism is a seed hoarded in the vault of doubt.

Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.

Under the pavement the dirt is dreaming of grass.

No doubt, the most challenging class of questions in science is the origin of things.

Error often is to be preferred to indecision.

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

The truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

At times truth may not seem probable.

It was rather awkward, insofar as we were both teetering between the possibility of something and the possibility of nothing.

We're still at a point where women [directors] aren't allowed to be mad visionaries. We have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we're responsible, that we can handle it, that we've got all our ducks in a row . . . most women who direct always come in on budget, always come in on schedule, and if they were wild and irresponsible it would not be put down to brilliance, but to a general flakiness.

We need to organize and figure out our own voice as a bloc and stop doubting ourselves.

I grew up in the country surrounded by music.