A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the...

Water, water, water….There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of...

Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is Progress.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

As for writing, that’s a cruel hard business. Unless you’re very lucky it’ll break your heart.

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

There have been some, even in the Park Service, who advocate spraying Delicate Arch with a fixative of some sort – Elmer’s glue perhaps or Lady Clairol Spray Net.

Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good....

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.

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you...

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

I hate and fear violence myself, have always avoided barroom brawls, and tho’ I’m a bit of a gun-nut, and a member of the NRA, I never shoot at anything but beer cans and mule deer. (In season.) And seldom hit either, except by accident.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.

I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else’s. I’m happy to respect authority when it’s genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I’m eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based...

One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.

Let’s have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence — for a political and/or economical purpose — carried out against people and other living things, and is usually conducted by governments against their own citizens (as at Kent State, or in Vietnam, or in Poland, or in most of Latin America right now),...

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno...

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town’s in trouble.

Not all questions can be answered.

Our ‘neoconservatives’ are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,’ I says, ‘but don’t insult me poor bleedin’ country.

So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.

But it is a writer’s duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante’s paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space...

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

A drink a day keeps the shrink away

An empty man is full of himself.

Certainly, I want to capture the reader’s attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power, we gain freedom from personal responsibility for what we do and are forced to do – the seduction of it – but we lose the dignity of being real men and...

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Grown men do not need leaders.

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood...

The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. … As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me....

If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss...

People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged NOT to read this book. Buy it, yes, but don’t read it. [Regarding “The Fool’s Progress”]

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is...

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody’s typewriter, even Tolstoy’s, even yours, even mine.

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

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!

It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world Nature is the only means by which we can requite God ‘ s obvious love for it.