The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Everyone needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.

Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.