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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...