A Quote by Aldo Leopold

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map? — © Aldo Leopold
What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind.
Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.
I can spot a homosexual at forty paces.
I have always had a blank spot where my regret is supposed to be.
It is without doubt that freedoms of the press and speech need to be protected, but there are undisputed limits to these freedoms, limits that often come into play when national security is threatened.
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.
I want to be able to get my point across. I respect people expressing their freedoms and their liberties and their rights, but at the same time I'm almost mindful that my freedoms can be other people's downfalls. I don't want to flash my freedoms in your face all the time, especially if they're going to be detrimental. I can get you to understand my point without going overboard, and we're cool.
Paradoxically one of the greatest advantages of mind maps is that they are seldom needed again. The very act of constructing a map is itself so effective in fixing ideas in memory that very often a whole map can recalled without going back to it at all. A mind map is so strongly visual and uses so many of the natural functions of memory that frequently it can be simply read off in the mind's eye.
The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.
Moses spent forty years in the king's palace thinking that he was somebody; then he lived forty years in the wilderness finding out that without GOD he was a nobody; finally he spent forty more years discovering how a nobody with GOD can be a somebody.
How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement - no matter how temporary.
I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.
A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.
If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you've been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.
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