The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

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. Heroes do not want power over others.

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

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

We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?