We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.

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

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.

You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.