What hunting means to me . . . Every hunter could spend hours responding to such a prompt. Our sport’s greatest authors have done just that, penning down their thoughts on the subject for future generations to enjoy.
Here are some of the best quotes on hunting, each found in Sporting Classics’ Passages.
“A man may not care for golf and still be human, but the man who does not like to see, hunt, photograph, or otherwise outwit birds or animals is not normal. He is super-civilized, and I for one do not know how to deal with him. Babes do not tremble when they are shown a golf ball, but I should not like to own the boy whose hair does not lift his hat when he sees his first deer.”
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
“A sportsman . . . is a gentleman first. But a sportsman, basically, is a man who kills what he needs, whether it’s a fish or a bird or an animal, or what he wants for a special reason, but he never kills anything just to kill it. And he tries to preserve the very same thing that he kills a little bit from time to time.”
— Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy, 1957
“If hunting is an ancient, obsolete, and outmoded way to live, then I will lie down on the blessed earth, let the wet moss saturate my body, open my eyes to the heaven beyond those boughs, and shout aloud my gratitude for the gift of birth in a time before hunting vanishes from the realms of human experience.”
— Richard Nelson, Heart & Blood—Living with Deer in America, 1997
“If the sentimentalist were right, hunting would develop in men a cruelty of character. But I have found that it inoculates patience, demands discipline and iron nerve, and develops a serenity of spirit that makes for long life and long love of life.”
— Archibald Rutledge, An American Hunter, 1937
“If you have learned nothing else from hunting, you have learned patience and stubbornness and concentration on what you really want at the expense of what there is to shoot. You have learned that man can as easily be debased as ennobled by a sport, and that optimism is the vital ingredient of any sort of chase, from girls to greater kudu.”
— Robert Ruark, Use Enough Gun, 1966
“If you hunt or fish a couple weeks in a row without reading newspapers or watching television, a certain, not altogether deserved grace can reenter your life.”
— Jim Harrison, Off to the Side, 2002
“It all adds up to this, an ancient roman inscription in a ruined forum near Timgad, Algeria: ‘To bathe, to talk, to laugh, to hunt—this is to live.'”
— John Madson, Going Out More, 1979
“It has always been my belief that one of the things that makes hunting and fishing so special is that on any given day things can happen to you that you will remember for the rest of your days. Very few things in everyday life are like that.”
— Lamar Underwood, The Greatest Hunting Stories Ever Told, 2000
“It has always seemed to me that if more fathers were woodsmen, and would teach their sons to be likewise, most of the so-called father-and-son problems would vanish.”
— Archibald Rutledge, An American Hunter, 1937
“It was then that my manhood came to the fore and I uttered what I thought were words of wisdom. ‘Whenever,’ I spoke solemnly, ‘whenever a man engages in any activity, be it the building of a house, the painting of a picture, or perchance the shooting of a mallard, if that activity makes him less of a menace to his fellow men, then it is justifiable and worth the sacrifice.'”
— Sigurd Olson, The Collected Works of Sigurd F. Olson, 1990
“It would be less than honest to maintain that all hunters are upright gentlemen, or even true sportsmen. But I’ll bet that if all boys were taught the joys of hunting and appreciation of the out-of-doors, half our psychiatrists, social workers, policemen, and prison guards would be out of work when the next generation takes over.”
