Roderick Haig-Brown Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers.

Roderick Haig-Brown
I have been, all my life, what is known as a conservationist. It seems clear beyond possibility of argument that any given generation of men can have only a lease, not ownership, of the earth; and one essential term of the lease is that the earth be handed down on to the next generation with unimpaired potentialities. This is the conservationist's concern.

Roderick Haig-Brown
There will be days when the fishing is better than one's most optimistic forecast, others when it is far worse. Either is a gain over just staying home.

Roderick Haig-Brown
I have fished through fishless days that I remember happily without regret.

Roderick Haig-Brown
Our tradition is that of the first man who sneaked away to the creek when the tribe did not really need fish.

Roderick Haig-Brown
Anglers...exaggerate grossly and make gentle and inoffensive creatures sound like wounded buffalo and man-eating tigers.

Roderick Haig-Brown
I have two hopes for the future. The first and lesser one is that game commissions will one day have sense enough to set limits that measurably reflect the sport safely available. The second and deeply urgent one is that we shall grow a race of sportsmen no one of whom will ever consider it a matter of pride to have killed a limit.

Roderick Haig-Brown
It is quite easy to debase the sport, change its values, dilute its ethics and destroy its traditional associations with quietness, relaxation and the opportunity to think. Angling is not a competitive sport. The fisherman'- s only real competition is with his quarry and his only real challenge is the challenge to himself. Nothing can add to this, but the blight of interhuman competition can certainly detract from it.

Roderick Haig-Brown
To this day I would rather see a fish, creep up to him and watch his rise to my fly than catch half a dozen fish unseen until they take.

Roderick Haig-Brown
I still don't know why I fish or why other men fish, except that we like it and it makes us think and feel.

Roderick Haig-Brown
I remember the good evenings I have fished, even the ones that realised material hopes not by the fish that came to the fly, but by the colour and movement of the water and sky, by the sounds and scents and gentle stirrings that were all about me.

Roderick Haig-Brown