Who would want to live in a world that is just not quite fatal?

When men do not run they are likely to die prematurely from dysfunction of the heart and vascular systems or from disabling chronic disease.

Men ran after and ate horses for four hundred thousand years. The outcome is more than a love of horse flesh; it is a runner's body.

The natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams.

Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies . . . despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level.

Man is a distance runner as a consequence of hundreds of thousands of years of chasing antelopes, horses, elephants, wild cattle, and deer.

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.