Simplicity is always a virtue.
What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
I’m a humanist; I’d rather kill a man than a snake.
Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere – particularly if they form loops.
The rifle and handgun are ‘equalizers’ – the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.
Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.
All governments require enemy governments.
Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth.
The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.
To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?
Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.
Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probably be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.
A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.
Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.
There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution.
Life without music would be an intolerable insult.
Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.