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.

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.

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

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.

I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.

War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.