- Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
- Our ‘neoconservatives’ are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.
- One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothin’ can beat teamwork.
- Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
- Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
- Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,’ I says, ‘but don’t insult me poor bleedin’ country.
- For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
- May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
- Grown men do not need leaders.
- Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- If the end does not justify the means – what can?
- A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
- A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
- Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
- The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
- Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
- You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.
- Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
- When a man’s best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
- Abolition of a woman’s right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
- There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
- The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages – as if the savages weren’t dangerous enough already.
- The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.
- That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.
- Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.
- Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
- Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.
- Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.
- What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.