Background Image

...

I Am Delighted, One More Time, By The Daring Of My Species And The Audacity Of Our Flying Machines. There Is Poetry And Music In Our Technology, A Beauty As Touching As That Of Eagle, Moss Campion, Raven Or Yonder Limestone Boulder Shining Under The Arctic Sun.

-Edward Abbey

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

I Am Delighted, One

Edward Abbey

...

I Am Delighted, One More Time, By The Daring Of My Species And The Audacity Of Our Flying Machines. There Is Poetry And Music In Our Technology, A Beauty As Touching As That Of Eagle, Moss Campion, Raven Or Yonder Limestone Boulder Shining Under The Arctic Sun.

Views: 85211

Topic

More From Edward Abbey

Vladimir Nabokov Was A Writer Who Cared Nothing For Music And Whose Favorite Sport Was The Pursuit, Capture, And Murder Of Butterflies. This Explains Many Things; For Example, The Fact That Nabokov's Novels, For All Their Elegance And Wit, Resemble Nothing So Much As Butterflies Pinned To A Board: Pretty But Dead; Symmetrical But Stiff.

What's The Difference Between The Lone Ranger And God? There Really Is A Lone Ranger.

Mental Degeneracy May Be Caused By Lead Poisoning. Or By A Poor Dip In The Gene Pool.

Growth For The Sake Of Growth Is The Ideology Of The Cancer Cell.

We Are Befouling And Destroying Our Own Home, We Are Committing A Slow But Accelerating Race Suicide And Life Murder - Planetary Biocide. Now There Is A Mighty Theme For A Mighty Book But A Challenge To Which No Modern Novelist Or Poet Has Yet Responded. Where Is Our Melville, Our Milton, Our Thomas Mann When We Need Him Most?

I Suppose Each Of Us Has His Own Fantasy Of How He Wants To Die. I Would Like To Go Out In A Blaze Of Glory, Myself, Or Maybe Simply Disappear Someday, Far Out In The Heart Of The Wilderness I Love, All By Myself, Alone With The Universe And Whatever God May Happen To Be Looking On. Disappear - And Never Return. That's My Fantasy.

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.

The Hawk's Cry Is As Sharp As Its Beak.

Music Is A Savage Art, A Measured Madness.

The Greater Your Dreams, The More Terrible Your Nightmares.

Desert Springtime, With Flowers Popping Up All Over The Place, Trees Leafing Out, Streams Gushing Down From The Mountains. Great Time Of Year For Hiking, Camping, Exploring, Sleeping Under The New Moon And The Old Stars. At Dawn And At Evening We Hear The Coyotes Howling With Excitement—mating Season.

A Crude Meal, No Doubt, But The Best Of All Sauces Is Hunger.

This Is The Most Beautiful Place On Earth. There Are Many Such Places. Every Man, Every Woman, Carries In Heart And Mind The Image Of The Ideal Place, The Right Place, The One True Home, Known Or Unknown, Actual Or Visionary.

You Cannot Reshape Human Nature Without Mutilating Human Beings.

Anarchism Is Democracy Taken Seriously.

The Feminist Notion That The Whole Of Human History Has Been Nothing But A Vast Intricate Conspiracy By Men To Enslave Their Wives, Mothers, Daughters, And Sisters Presents Us With An Intellectual Neurosis For Which We Do Not Yet Have A Name.

There Is Science, Logic, Reason; There Is Thought Verified By Experience. And Then There Is California.

You Can't Belay A Man Who's Falling In Love.

Falling In Love

If People Persist In Trespassing Upon The Grizzlies' Territory, We Must Accept The Fact That The Grizzlies, From Time To Time, Will Harvest A Few Trespassers.

The Basic Science Is Not Physics Or Mathematics But Biology -- The Study Of Life. We Must Learn To Think Both Logically And Bio-logically.

For Myself I Hold No Preferences Among Flowers, So Long As They Are Wild, Free, Spontaneous. Bricks To All Greenhouses! Black Thumb And Cutworm To The Potted Plant!

May Your Rivers Flow Without End... Down Into A Desert Of Red Rock, Blue Mesas, Domes And Pinnacles And Grottos Of Endless Stone, And Down Again Into A Deep Vast Ancient Unknown Chasm Where Bars Of Sunlight Blaze On Profiled Cliffs... Where Something Strange And More Beautiful And More Full Of Wonder Than Your Deepest Dreams Waits For You-beyond That Next Turning Of The Canyon Walls.

Wilderness Is Not A Luxury But A Necessity Of The Human Spirit.

A Man Is Not Aware Of His Virtues (if Any). Nevertheless, One Hopes That They Exist.

Mayonnaise, Like Hollandaise, Was Invented By The French To Cover Up The Flavor Of Spoiled Flesh, Stale Vegetables, Rotten Fish. Beware The Sauce! Where Food Comes Beslobbered With An Elegant Slime You May Well Suspect The Integrity Of The Basic Ingredients.

Our Big Social Institutions Do Not Reflect Human Nature; They Distort It.

Football Is A Game For Trained Apes. That, In Fact, Is What Most Of The Players Are -- Retarded Gorillas Wearing Helmets And Uniforms. The Only Thing More Debased Is The Surrounding Mob Of Drunken Monkeys Howling The Gorillas On.

I Love America Because It Is A Confused, Chaotic Mess - And I Hope We Can Keep It This Way For At Least Another Thousand Years. The Permissive Society Is The Free Society.

There Is A Deep, Abiding, Unshakable Satisfaction In A Life Of Complete Failure.

Terrorism: Deadly Violence Against Humans And Other Living Things, Usually Conducted By Government Against Its Own People.

Counterpart To The Knee-jerk Liberal Is The New Knee-pad Conservative, Always Groveling Before The Rich And The Powerful.

Anyone Not Paranoid In This World Must Be Crazy. . . . Speaking Of Paranoia, It's True That I Do Not Know Exactly Who My Enemies Are. But That Of Course Is Exactly Why I'm Paranoid.

The Nuclear Bomb Took All The Fun Out Of War.

Somewhere In The Depths Of Solitude, Beyond Wilderness And Freedom, Lay The Trap Of Madness.

We Need The Possibility Of Escape As Surely As We Need Hope.

To Die Alone, On Rock Under Sun At The Brink Of The Unknown, Like A Wolf, Like A Great Bird, Seems To Me Very Good Fortune Indeed.

Put The Park Rangers To Work. Lazy Scheming Loafers, They've Wasted Too Many Years Selling Tickets At Toll Booths And Sitting Behind Desks Filling Out Charts And Tables

There Has Never Been A Day In My Life When I Was Not In Love.

Is The Archbishop's Blessing Any More Meaningful Than The Politician's Handshake? The Come, They Go, With Bigger Things Than Us On Their Minds.

Desire, Said The Buddha, Is The Cause Of Suffering. But Without Desire, What Delight?

John Updike: Our Greatest Suburban Chic-boutique Man Of Letters. A Smug And Fatal Complacency Has Stunted His Growth Beyond Hope Of Surgical Repair. Not Enough Passion In His Collected Works To Generate Steam In A Beer Can. Nevertheless, He Is Considered By Some Critics To Be America's Finest *living* Author: Hold A Chilled Mirror To His Lips And You Will See, Presently, A Fine And Dewy Moisture Condensing -- Like A Faery Breath! -- Upon The Glass.

How Strange And Wonderful Is Our Home, Our Earth, With Its Swirling Vaporous Atmosphere, Its Flowing And Frozen Liquids, Its Trembling Plants, Its Creeping, Crawling, Climbing Creatures, The Croaking Things With Wings That Hang On Rocks And Soar Through The Fog, The Furry Grass, The Scaly Seas.

The Rich Are Not Very Nice. That's Why They're Rich.

I Always Write With My .357 Magnum Handy. Why? Well, You Never Know When God May Try To Interfere.

Romanticism Was More Than Merely An Alternative To A Sterile Classicism; Romanticism Made Possible, Especially In Art, A Great Expansion Of The Human Consciousness.

There Is No Trajectory So Pathetic As That Of An Artist In Decline.

Some People Write To Please, To Soothe, To Console. Others To Provoke, To Challenge, To Exasperate And Infuriate. I've Always Found The Second Approach The More Pleasing.

There Are Circumstances In Which Suicide Presents A Viable Option; A Workable Alternative; The Only Sensible Solution.

Simplicity Is Always A Virtue. One Kid On A Riverbank Working Out A Stephen Foster Tune On His New Harmonica Heard From The Correct Esthetic Distance Projects More Magic And Power Than The Entire Vienna Philharmonic And Chorus Laboring (once Again) Through The Mozart Requiem Or Bach's B Minor Mass.

Say What You Like About My Bloody Murderous Government,' I Says, 'but Don't Insult Me Poor Bleedin' Country.

From The Point Of View Of A Tapeworm, Man Was Created By God To Serve The Appetite Of The Tapeworm.

Christian Theology: Nothing So Grotesque Could Possibly Be True.

My Own Best Books Have Not Been Published. In Fact, They've Not Even Been Written Yet.

Salome Had But Seven Veils; The Artist Has A Thousand.

Suicide: Don't Knock It If You Ain't Tried It.

The Absurd Vanity Of Metaphysicians Who Like To Imagine That They Create The World By Thinking About It.

Taxation: How The Sheep Are Shorn.

Do I Believe In Ghosts? I Believe In The Ghosts That Haunt The Human Mind.

The Artist In Our Time Has Two Chief Responsibilities: (1) Art; And (2) Sedition.

The Tank, The B-52, The Fighter-bomber, The State-controlled Police And Military Are The Weapons Of Dictatorship. The Rifle Is The Weapon Of Democracy. Not For Nothing Was The Revolver Called An "equalizer."

The Result Of This Bestial Lust Is An Indiscriminate And Promiscuous Splaying Of All Of My Energies- Wanting All, I Accomplish Nothing; Desiring Everything, I Satisfy Nothing And Am Satisfied By Nothing.

Accomplish Nothing

It May Be True That My Desk Here Is Really 'nothing But' A Transient Eddy Of Electrons In The Flux Of Universal Process. Nevertheless, I Find That It Continues To Support My Feet, My Revolver, And My Cigars All Day Long. What Happens When My Back Is Turned I Don't Know. Or Much Care. That's No Concern Of Mine.

As War And Government Prove, Insanity Is The Most Contagious Of Diseases.

Come With Me, The River Said, Close Your Eyes And Quiet Your Limbs And Float With Me Into The Wonder And Mystery Of The Canyons, See The Unknown And The Little Known, Look Upon The Stone Gods Face To Face, See Medusa, Drink My Waters, Hear My Song, Feel My Power, Come Along And Drift With Me Toward The Distant, Ultimate And Legendary Sea.

Most Of My Wandering In The Desert I've Done Alone. Not So Much From Choice As From Necessity - I Generally Prefer To Go Into Places Where No One Else Wants To Go. I Find That In Contemplating The Natural World My Pleasure Is Greater If There Are Not Too Many Others Contemplating It With Me, At The Same Time.

I Took The Other Road, All Right, But Only Because It Was The Easy Road For Me, The Way I Wanted To Go. If I've Encountered Some Unnecessary Resistance That's Because Most Of The Traffic Is Going The Other Way.

Truth Is Merely Common Sense, Say The Naive Realist. Really? Then Where, Precisely, Is The Location Of--a Rainbow? In The Air? In The Eye? In Between? Or Somewhere Else?

What Ideal, Immutable Platonic Cloud Could Equal The Beauty And Perfection Of Any Ordinary Everyday Cloud Floating Over, Say, Tuba City, Arizona, On A Hot Day In June?

Original Sin, The True Original Sin, Is The Blind Destruction For The Sake Of Greed Of This Natural Paradise Which Lies All Around Us-if Only We Were Worthy Of It.

What Is Reason? Knowledge Informed By Sympathy, Intelligence In The Arms Of Love.

Government: If You Refuse To Pay Unjust Taxes, Your Property Will Be Confiscated. If You Attempt To Defend Your Property, You Will Be Arrested. If You Resist Arrest, You Will Be Clubbed. If You Defend Yourself Against Clubbing, You Will Be Shot Dead. These Procedures Are Known As The Rule Of Law.

Only A Fool Would Leave The Enjoyment Of Rainbows To The Opticians. Or Give The Science Of Optics The Last Word On The Matter.

Apuleius Married A Rich Widow, Then Wrote _the Golden Ass_.

It Will Be Objected That A Constantly Increasing Population Makes Resistance And Conservation A Hopeless Battle. This Is True. Unless A Way Is Found To Stabilize The Nation's Population, The Parks Can Not Be Saved. Or Anything Else Worth A Damn. Wilderness Preservation, Like A Hundred Other Good Causes, Will Be Forgotten Under The Overwhelming Pressure Of A Struggle For Mere Survival And Sanity In A Completely Urbanized, Completely Industrialized, Ever More Crowded Environment. For My Own Part I Would Rather Take My Chances In A Thermonuclear War Than Live In Such A World.

I Have Been Called A Curmudgeon, Which My Obsolescent Dictionary Defines As A "surly, Illmannered, Badtempered Fellow." ... Nowadays, Curmudgeon Is Likely To Refer To Anyone Who Hates Hypocrisy, Cant, Sham, Dogmatic Ideologies, The Pretenses And Evasions Of Euphemism, And Has The Nerve To Point Out Unpleasant Facts And Takes The Trouble To Impale These Sins On The Skewer Of Humor And Roast Them Over The Fires Of Empiric Fact, Common Sense, And Native Intelligence. In This Nation Of Bleating Sheep And Braying Jackasses, It Then Becomes An Honor To Be Labeled Curmudgeon.

Without Courage, All Other Virtues Are Useless.

I Wouldn't Trade A Good Horse For The Best Rolls-royce Ever Made -- Unless I Could Trade The Rolls For Two Good Horses.

When The Biggest, Richest, Glassiest Buildings In Town Are The Banks, You Know That Town's In Trouble.

There Is Beauty, Heartbreaking Beauty, Everywhere.

Beauty Everywhere

Men Come And Go, Cities Rise And Fall, Whole Civilizations Appear And Disappear-the Earth Remains, Slightly Modified. The Earth Remains, And The Heartbreaking Beauty Where There Are No Hearts To Break....i Sometimes Choose To Think, No Doubt Perversely, That Man Is A Dream, Thought An Illusion, And Only Rock Is Real. Rock And Sun.

Truth Is Always The Enemy Of Power. And Power The Enemy Of Truth.

The Desert Wears... A Veil Of Mystery. Motionless And Silent It Evokes In Us An Elusive Hint Of Something Unknown, Unknowable, About To Be Revealed. Since The Desert Does Not Act It Seems To Be Waiting -- But Waiting For What?

Despair Leads To Boredom, Electronic Games, Computer Hacking, Poetry And Other Bad Habits.

Liberty Cannot Be Guaranteed By Law. Nor By Any Thing Else Except The Resolution Of Free Citizens To Defend Their Liberties.

Freedom Begins Between The Ears.

I Am My Brother's Keeper, Says The Chickenshit Liberal. Perhaps He Does Not Realize That He Now Has More Than 2 1/2 Billion Brothers.

When The Situation Is Desperate, It Is Too Late To Be Serious. Be Playful.

Is There A God? Who Knows? Is There An Angry Unicorn On The Dark Side Of The Moon?

James Joyce Buried Himself In His Great Work. _finnegan's Wake_ Is His Monument And His Tombstone. A Dead End.

Among Politicians And Businessmen, *pragmatism* Is The Current Term For 'to Hell With Our Children.'

There Is A Fine Art To Making Enemies And It Requires Diligent Cultivation. It's Not As Easy As It Looks.

I Have Written Much About Many Good Places. But The Best Places Of All, I Have Never Mentioned.

Everyone Should Learn A Manual Trade: It's Never Too Late To Become An Honest Person.

Our “neoconservatives” Are Neither New Nor Conservative, But Old As Babylon And Evil As Hell.

The Rifle And Handgun Are 'equalizers' -- The Weapons Of A Democracy. Tanks And Bombers Represent Dictatorship.

The Sneakiest Form Of Literary Subtlety, In A Corrupt Society, Is To Speak The Plain Truth. The Critics Will Not Understand You; The Public Will Not Believe You; Your Fellow Writers Will Shake Their Heads. Laughter, Praise, Honors, Money, And The Love Of Beautiful Girls Will Be Your Only Reward.

Grown Men Do Not Need Leaders.

A Crowded Society Is A Restrictive Society; An Overcrowded Society Becomes An Authoritarian, Repressive And Murderous Society.

Baseball Is A Slow, Sluggish Game, With Frequent And Trivial Interruptions, Offering The Spectator Many Opportunities To Reflect At Leisure Upon The Situation On The Field: This Is What A Fan Loves Most About The Game

Trout Fishing. One Must Be A Stickler For Proper Form. Use Nothing But #4 Blasting Caps, Or A Hand Grenade, If Handy, Or At A Pool Well-lined With Stone, One Blast From A .44 Magnum Will Bring A Few Stunned Brookies Quietly To The Surface.

Three Words Remain That Can Yet Stir The Blood Of Man: The Word 'rebellion'; The Word 'revolt'; The Word 'revolution'.

It May Be True That There Are No Atheists In Foxholes. But You Don't Find Many Christians There, Either. Or, About As Many Of One As The Other.

It Is Not Enough To Understand The Natural World; The Point Is To Defend And Preserve It.

When Guns Are Outlawed, Only The Government Will Have Guns. The Government - And A Few Outlaws. If That Happens, You Can Count Me Among The Outlaws.

What Is Truth? I Don't Know And I'm Sorry I Brought It Up.

The Love Of Wilderness Is More Than A Hunger For What Is Always Beyong Reach; It Is Also An Expression Of Loyalty To The Earth, The Earth Which Bore Us And Sustains Us, The Only Paradise We Shall Ever Know, The Only Paradise We Ever Need, If Only We Had The Eyes To See.

Wealth And How To Achieve It: Let Us Define The Wealthy Man As He Who Has Everything He Desires. How To Reach That Happy Condition? Two Ways

The More Fantastic An Ideology Or Theology, The More Fanatic Its Adherents.

Nature, Like Maimonides Said, Is Mainly A Good Place To Throw Beer Cans On Sunday Afternoons.

Places: A Cold, Bleak, Lonely Day On The Rim At Muley Point, Utah. And The Heart-cracking Loveliness Of The Blood-smeared, Bitter, Incomprehensible Slaughterhouse Of A World.

Saving The World Is Only A Hobby. Most Of The Time I Do Nothing.

All Power Rests On Hierarchy: An Army Is Nothing But A Well-organized Lynch Mob.

To Meet God Or Medusa Face To Face, Even If It Means Risking Everything Human In Myself. I Dream Of A Hard And Brutal Mysticism In Which The Naked Self Merges With The Nonhuman World And Yet Somehow Survives Still Intact Individual, Separate. Paradox And Bedrock.

I Find More And More, As I Grow Older, That I Prefer Women To Men, Children To Adults, Animals To Humans.... And Rocks To Living Things? No, I'm Not That Old Yet.

Indolence And Melancholy: Each Generates The Other. If One Can Speak Of Such Feeble Passions As Generating Anything.

I Thought Of The Wilderness We Had Left Behind Us, Open To Sea And Sky, Joyous In Its Plenitude And Simplicity, Perfect Yet Vulnerable, Unaware Of What Is Coming, Defended By Nothing, Guarded By No One.

Why Do I Write? I Write To Entertain My Friends And To Exasperate Our Enemies. To Unfold The Folded Lie, To Record To Truth Of Our Time, And, Of Course, To Promote Esthetic Bliss.

The "terror" Of The French Revolution Lasted For Ten Years. The Terror That Preceded And Led To It Lasted For A Thousand Years.

There Is No Force More Potent In The Modern World Than Stupidity Fueled By Greed.

If Wilderness Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Can Save Wilderness.

How Could Anything Non-controversial Be Of Intellectual Interest To Grown-ups?

Filling Out The Form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal Anarchy. Hobbies? Survival With Honor.

The Sense Of Justice Springs From Self-respect; Both Are Coeval With Our Birth. Children Are Born With An Innate Sense Of Justice; It Usually Takes Twelve Years Of Public Schooling And Four More Years Of College To Beat It Out Of Them.

The Earth Is Real. Only A Fool, Milking His Cow, Denies The Cow's Reality.

By The Age Of Forty, A Man Is Responsible For His Face. And His Fate.

Water, Water, Water....there Is No Shortage Of Water In The Desert But Exactly The Right Amount , A Perfect Ratio Of Water To Rock, Water To Sand, Insuring That Wide Free Open, Generous Spacing Among Plants And Animals, Homes And Towns And Cities, Which Makes The Arid West So Different From Any Other Part Of The Nation. There Is No Lack Of Water Here Unless You Try To Establish A City Where No City Should Be.

Roosters: The Cry Of The Male Chicken Is The Most Barbaric Yawp In All Of Nature.

Once Upon A Time, I Dreamed Of Becoming A Great Man. Later, A Good Man. Now, Finally, I Find It Difficult Enough And Honor Enough To Be -- A Man.

Once Upon A Time

Paradise For A Happy Man Lies In His Own Good Nature.

All Men Are Brothers, We Like To Say, Half-wishing Sometimes In Secret It Were Not True. But Perhaps It Is True. And Is The Evolutionary Line From Protozoan To Spinoza Any Less Certain? That Also May Be True. We Are Obliged, Therefore, To Spread The News, Painful And Bitter Though It May Be For Some To Hear, That All Living Things On Earth Are Kindred.

We Are Preoccupied With Time. If We Could Learn To Love Space As Deeply As We Are Now Obsessed With Time, We Might Discover A New Meaning In The Phrase To Live Like Men.

Writers Should Avoid The Academy. When A Writer Begins To Accept Pay For Talking About Words, We Know What He Will Produce Soon: Nothing But Words.

Every Important Change In Our Society, For The Good, At Least, Has Taken Place Because Of Popular Pressure-pressure From Below, From The Great Mass Of People.

It Is Not The Writer's Task To Answer Questions But To Question Answers. To Be Impertinent, Insolent, And, If Necessary, Subversive.

The World Exists For Its Own Sake, Not For Ours. Swallow *that* Pill!

When Riding My Old Harley A Ninety Per At Midnight Down The Via Roma In Naples, I Kept One Consolation Firmly In Mind: If Anything Goes Wrong, I'll Never Have Time To Regret It.

One Single Act Of Defiance Against Power, Against The State That Seems Omnipotent But Is Not, Transforms And Transfigures The Human Personality. At Least For A Time. For A While. Perhaps That Is Enough.

It Seems Clear At Last That Our Love For The Natural World-nature-is The Only Means By Which We Can Requite God's Obvious Love For It.

There Has Never Been An 'original' Sin: Each Is Quite Banal.

Women: We Cannot Love Them All. But We Must Try.

Civilization Is A Youth With A Molotov Cocktail In His Hand. Culture Is The Soviet Tank Or L.a. Cop That Guns Him Down.

Molotov Cocktail

The Best Thing About Graduating From The University Was That I Finally Had Time To Sit On A Log And Read A Good Book.

I’m Tired Of Doing What I Don’t Want To Do To Live The Way I Don’t Want To Live.

In America, As Elsewhere, The General Irritability Level Keeps Rising.

One Thing More Dangerous Than Getting Between A Grizzly Sow And Her Cub Is Getting Between A Businessman And A Dollar Bill.

Ah Yes, The Head Is Full Of Books. The Hard Part Is To Force Them Down Through The Bloodstream And Out Through The Fingers.

There Comes A Point, In Literary Objectivity, When The Author's Self- Effacement Is Hard To Distinguish From Moral Cowardice.

No Man-made Structure In All Of American History Has Been Hated So Much, By So Many, For So Long, With Such Good Reason, As That Glen Canyon Dam At Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital Of Coconino County.

Man's Deliberate Destruction Of His Own Habitat -- Planet Earth -- Could Serve As A Mighty Theme For A Mighty Book Worthy Of A Modern Melville Or Tolstoy. But Our Best Fictioneers Confine Themselves To Domestic Drama -- Soap Opera With Literary Trimmings.

My Own Ambition, My Deepest And Truest Ambition, Is To Find Within Myself Someday, Somehow, The Ability To Do Likewise, To Do Nothing - And Find It Enough.

A Journey Into The Wilderness Is The Freest, Cheapest, Most Nonprivileged Of Pleasures. Anyone With Two Legs And The Price Of A Pair Of Army Surplus Combat Boots May Enter.

When A Man Must Be Afraid To Drink Freely From His Country's River And Streams That Country Is No Longer Fit To Live In.

Rocks, Like Louseworts And Snail Darters And Pupfish And 3rdworld Black, Lesbian, Feminist, Militant Poets, Have Rights, Too. Especially The Right To Exist.

Recorded History Is Largely An Account Of The Crimes And Disasters Committed By Banal Little Men At The Levers Of Imperial Machines.

There Are Two Kinds Of People I Cannot Abide: Bigots And Any Well-organized Ethnic Group.

But It Is A Writer's Duty To Write And Speak And Record The Truth, Always The Truth, No Matter Whom May Be Offended.

The Night I Filled An Inside Straight: Even A Blind Hog's Gonna Root Up An Acorn Once In A While.

Humans Were Free Before The Word Freedom Became Necessary.

So I Lived Alone. The First Thing I Did Was Take Off My Pants. Naturally.

Quantum Mechanics Provides Us With An Approximate, Plausible, Conjectural Explanation Of What Actually Is, Or Was, Or May Be Taking Place Inside A Cyclotron During A Dark Night In February.

War: First Day In The U.s. Army, The Government Placed A Bible In My Left Hand, A Bayonet In The Other.

Balance, That's The Secret. Moderate Extremism. The Best Of Both Worlds.

Most New Books Drop Immediately Into The Oblivion They So Richly Deserve.

All Serious Writers Want The Obvious Rewards: Fame, Money, Women, Love -- And Most Of All, An Audience!

One Man Alone Can Be Pretty Dumb Sometimes, But For Real Bona Fide Stupidity, There Ain't Nothing Can Beat Teamwork.

I Intend To Be Good For The Rest Of My Natural Life -- If I Live That Long.

Be As I Am - A Reluctant Enthusiast....a Part-time Crusader, A Half-hearted Fanatic....so Get Out There And Hunt And Fish And Mess Around With Your Friends, Ramble Out Yonder And Explore The Forests, Climb The Mountains, Bag The Peaks, Run The Rivers, Breathe Deep Of That Yet Sweet And Lucid Air, Sit Quietly For A While And Contemplate The Precious Stillness, The Lovely, Mysterious, And Awesome Space.

The Ever-rising Cost Of Living: Someday Soon, The Corporate Technicians Will Be Locking Meters On Our Noses And Charging Us A Royalty On The Air We Breathe.

The Missionaries Go Forth To Christianize The Savages - As If The Savages Weren't Dangerous Enough Already.

To Be Alive Is To Take Risks; To Be Always Safe And Secure Is Death.

I Am Not An Atheist But An Earthiest. Be True To The Earth.

In Metaphysics, The Notion That Earth And All That's On It Is A Mental Construct Is The Product Of People Who Spend Their Lives Inside Rooms. It Is An Indoor Philosophy.

Reincarnation? There Is Such A Thing. What Could Be More Mozartian Than The Nutcracker Suite?

If We Had The Power Of Ten Shakespeares Or A Dozen Mozarts, We Could Not Produce Anything Half So Marvelous As One Ordinary Human Child.

Climbing K2 Or Floating The Grand Canyon In An Inner Tube; There Are Some Things One Would Rather Have Done Than Do.

When A Writer Has Done The Best That He Can Do, He Should Then Withdraw From The Book-writing Business And Take Up An Honest Trade Like Shoe Repair, Cattle Stealing, Or Screwworm Management.

Cowboys Make Better Lovers: Ask Any Cow.

Alaska's Chief Attractions Are: (a) Its Small And Insignificant Human Population, Thanks To The Miserable Climate; And (b) Its Large And Magnificent Wildlife Population, Thanks To (a). Both Of These Attractions Are Being Rapidly Diminished, However, By (c) The Law Of Growth And Space-age Sleaze.

A World Without Huge Regions Of Total Wilderness Would Be A Cage; A World Without Lions And Tigers And Vultures And Snakes And Elk And Bison Would Be - Will Be - A Human Zoo. A High-tech Slum.

To The Question: Wilderness, Who Needs It? Doc Would Say: Because We Like The Taste Of Freedom, Comrades. Because We Like The Smell Of Danger. But, Thought Hayduke, What About The Smell Of Fear, Dad?

Anarchism Is Founded On The Observation That Since Few Men Are Wise Enough To Rule Themselves, Even Fewer Are Wise Enough To Rule Others.

Wilderness Is Not A Luxury But A Necessity Of The Human Spirit, And As Vital To Our Lives As Water And Good Bread. A Civilization Which Destroys What Little Remains Of The Wild, The Spare, The Original, Is Cutting Itself Off From Its Origins And Betraying The Principle Of Civilization Itself.

An Empty Man Is Full Of Himself.

A House Built On Greed Cannot Long Endure.

In All Of Nature, There Is No Sound More Pleasing Than That Of A Hungry Animal At Its Feed. Unless You Are The Food.

Power Is Always Dangerous. Power Attracts The Worst And Corrupts The Best.

Most Of Us Lead Lives Of Chaotic Improvisation From Day To Day, Bawling For Peace While Plunging Grimly Into Fresh Disorders.

So I Write Mainly For The Fun Of It, The Hell Of It, The Duty Of It. I Enjoy Writing And Will Probably Be A Scribbler On My Dying Day, Sprawled On Some Stony Trail Halfway Between Two Dry Waterholes.

To The Intelligent Man Or Woman, Life Appears Infinitely Mysterious. But The Stupid Have An Answer For Every Question.

Wilderness Begins In The Human Mind.

Jack Kerouac, Like A Sick Refrigerator, Worked Too Hard At Keeping Cool And Died On His Mama's Lap From Alcohol And Infantilism.

When A Man's Best Friend Is His Dog, That Dog Has A Problem.

The Domination Of Nature Leads To The Domination Of Human Nature.

Democracy -- Rule By The People -- Sounds Like A Fine Thing; We Should Try It Sometime In America.

The Extreme Clarity Of The Desert Light Is Equaled By The Extreme Individuation Of Desert Life Forms. Love Flowers Best In Openness And Freedom.

There Has Never Yet Been A Human Society Worthy Of The Name Of Civilization. Civilization Remains A Remote Ideal.

In The End, For All Our Differences And Conflicts, Most Women And Men Share The Same Food, Work, Shelter, Bed, Life, Joy, Anguish, And Fate. We Need Each Other.

How To Overthrow The System: Brew Your Own Beer; Kick In Your Tee Vee; Kill Your Own Beef; Build Your Own Cabin And Piss Off The Front Porch Whenever You Bloody Well Feel Like It.

I'm A Fastidious Sort Of Fellow, Fond Of Watermelon And Buckbrush Nuts.

To The Technocrats: Have Mercy On Us. Relax A Bit, Take Time Out For Simple Pleasures. For Example, The Luxuries Of Electricity, Indoor Plumbing, Central Heating, Instant Electronic Communication And Such, Have Taught Me To Relearn And Enjoy The Basic Human Satisfactions Of Dipping Water From A Cold Clear Mountain Stream; Of Building A Wood Fire In A Cast-iron Stove; Of Using Long Winter Nights For Making Music, Making Things, Making Love; Of Writing Long Letters, In Longhand With A Fountain Pen, To The Few People On This Earth I Truly Care About.

Trending Author

R. Buckminster Fuller

Category