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.
The rich are not very nice. That’s why they’re rich.
One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers.
The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them.
A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.