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. …...

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,...

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...

[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.

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

If the end does not justify the means – what can?

And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.

Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive...

The weather here is windy, balmy, sometimes wet. Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring,...

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...

When the philosopher’s argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense

Walking is the only form of transportation in which a man proceeds erect – like a man – on his own legs, under his own power. There is immense satisfaction in that.

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells...

The gross evil of our time defies all labels.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth – with a capital G. ‘Progress’ in our nation has for too long been confused with...

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

As to the charge that I am a cranky old man, I plead guilty.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Beyond the river and ten miles east of the city the Sangre Mountains began to reveal themselves in more detail as the sun rose higher, the rampart of blue shadow dissolving in the light, exposing...

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the...

There is this to be said for walking: it is the one method of human locomotion by which a man or woman proceeds erect, upright, proud and independent, not squatting on the haunches like a...

Why can’t we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the...

Hard times are a-coming, and people without useful, practical skills are going to suffer. Or suffer most.

Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard–but the grass will prevail.

And the so-called ‘political process’ is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.

In any nation but the USA, it is taken for granted that a man of distinction, ability, wealth or power will keep a mistress and a few girlfriends on the side. Only in America, still...

A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred ‘great books’ – and one brave deed is worth a thousand.

If it’s knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.

Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains....

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

In the modern techno-industrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood

Reason is and ought to be, as Hume said, the slave of the passions.

Perhaps I shouldn’t call it shit. That’s a bit crude. I don’t really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is...

I’d like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards and a modest human population – about 25 million would be plenty – of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting...

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

Taxation: how the sheep are shorn

If you hope for any sort of dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or radical side of politics, you must cease from silly verbal abuse. If you don’t want it, then...

The one thing … that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial....