A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.
The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
The “terror” of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.
The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.
In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.
Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.
Women who love only women may have a good point.
Nature, like Miamonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.
Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.
Wilderness begins in the human mind.
I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.
Narrow-minded provincialism: Sad to say but true – I am more interested in the mountain lions of Utah, the wild pigs of Arizona, than I am in the fate of all the Arabs of Araby, all the Wogs of Hindustan, all the Ethiopes of Abyssinia...
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?
Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.
Scientific method: There’s a madness in the method.
A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist.