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.

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.

All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationist.

The industrial corporation is the natural enemy of nature.