Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday’s newspaper.
Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.
Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.
I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world...
A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it’s not the beer cans that are ugly; it’s the highway that is ugly.
In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.
How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?
Every important change in our society, for the good, at least, has taken place because of popular pressure-pressure from below, from the great mass of people.
I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I’ve encountered some unnecessary resistance that’s because most of the traffic is going the other way.
Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.
The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life’s basic consolations.
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.
All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.
Love flowers best in openness and freedom.