“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.”

— Aldo Leopold, book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 225.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is …" by Aldo Leopold?

Aldo Leopold130

American writer and scientist 1887–1948

Related quotes

“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. … 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 book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 203-204.

“I am a vegetarian because I believe that present-day ethics is founded on that puerile, pre-Darwinian delusion that all other kinds of creatures and all worlds were created explicitly for the hominine species. Vegetarianism is the ethical corollary of evolution. It is simply the expansion of ethics to suit the biological revelations of Charles Darwin. Evolution has taught us the kinship of all creatures.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895), pp. 19–20

“They have learned the importance of intellectual integrity, social responsibility, and ethical commitment.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

“Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 209.

“The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and vivid the phenomena that are more and more distant in both space and time.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Modern Ethics", pp. 268–269
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

““The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.”
“Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical.””

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 220)

“A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity, that ever were written.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Robert Skipwith (3 August 1771) http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-02_Bk.html#hd_lf054.2.head.010 ; also in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 4, p. 239 http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC61981280&id=YjaXnbNMaccC&pg=RA6-PA239&lpg=RA6-PA239&dq=Bergh+%22volumes+of+ethics,+and+divinity%22 <br class="br">1770s

“Ethical individualism… is spiritualized theory of evolution carried over into moral life.”

Rudolf Steiner book Philosophy of Freedom

Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 12

“An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 202.

“I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important.”

George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984) American paleontologist

Cited in: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250

“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.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Aldo Leopold130

Related quotes

Related topics