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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

-Edward Abbey

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Put The Park Rangers

Edward Abbey

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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

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Baseball Serves As A Good Model For Democracy In Action: Every Player Is Equally Important And Each Has A Chance To Be A Hero.

The Writer Concerned More With Technique Than Truth Becomes A Technician, Not An Artist.

In Everything But Brains And Brawn, Women Are Vastly Superior To Men. A Different Race.

There Is Beauty, Heartbreaking Beauty, Everywhere.

Beauty Everywhere

Grand Opera Is A Form Of Musical Entertainment For People Who Hate Music.

I Now Find The Most Marvelous Things In The Everyday, The Ordinary, The Common, The Simple And Tangible.

Capitalism: Nothing So Mean Could Be Right. Greed Is The Ugliest Of The Capital Sins.

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.

Every Man Has Two Vocations: His Own And Philosophy.

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.

The Tragedy Of Modern War Is That The Young Men Die Fighting Each Other - Instead Of Their Real Enemies Back Home In The Capitals.

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

Alaska Is Our Biggest, Buggiest, Boggiest State. Texas Remains Our Largest Unfrozen State. But Mountainous Utah, If Ironed Out Flat, Would Take Up More Space On A Map Than Either.

Whenever I Read _time_ Or _newsweek_ Or Such Magazines, I Wash My Hands Afterward. But How To Wash Off The Small But Odious Stain Such Reading Leaves On The Mind?

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?

My Sole Literary Ambition Is To Write One Good Novel, Then Retire To My Hut In The Desert, Assume The Lotus Position, Compose My Mind And Senses, And Sink Into Meditation, Contemplating My Novel.

Love Implies Anger. The Man Who Is Angered By Nothing Cares About Nothing.

The Developers And Entrepreneurs Must Somehow Be Taught A New Vocabulary Of Values.

It Is True That Some Of My Fiction Was Based On Actual Events. But The Events Took Place After The Fiction Was Written.

Under The Desert Sun, In The Dogmatic Clarity, The Fables Of Theology And The Myths Of Classical Philosophy Dissolve Like Mist. The Air Is Clean, The Rock Cuts Cruelly Into Flesh; Shatter The Rock And The Odor Of Flint Rises To Your Nostrils, Bitter And Sharp. Whirlwinds Dance Across The Salt Flats, A Pillar Of Dust By Day; The Thornbush Breaks Into Flame At Night. What Does It Mean? It Means Nothing. It Is As It Is And Has No Need For Meaning. The Desert Lies Beneath And Soars Beyond Any Possible Human Qualification. Therefore, Sublime.

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.

Anarchy Works. Italy Has Proved It For A Thousand Years.

I'd Sooner Exchange Ideas With The Birds On Earth Than Learn To Carry On Intergalactic Communications With Some Obscure Race Of Humanoids On A Satellite Planet From The World Of Betelgeuse.

Life: Another Day, Another Dolor.

The Best People, Like The Best Wines, Come From The Hills.

Scientific Method: There's A Madness In The Method.

Scientific Method

Belief In God? An Afterlife? I Believe In Rock: This Apodictic Rock Beneath My Feet.

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

The Idea Of Wilderness Needs No Defense. It Only Needs More Defenders. Remaining Silent About The Destruction Of Nature Is An Endorsement Of That Destruction.

My Books Always Make The Best-seller Lists In Wolf Hole, Arizona, And Hanksville, Utah.

One Of The Pleasant Things About Small Town Life Is That Everyone, Whether Rich Or Poor, Liked Or Disliked, Has Some Kind Of A Role And Place In The Community. I Never Felt That Living In A City - As I Once Did For A Couple Of Years.

Some Of My Ancestors Fought In The American Revolution. A Few More Wore Red Coats, A Few Wore Blue Coats, And The Rest Wore No Coats At All. We Never Did Figure Out Who Won That War.

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 New Age Orgy: The Flesh Was Willing But The Spirit's Weak.

‎"if My Decomposing Carcass Helps Nourish The Roots Of A Juniper Tree Or The Wings Of A Vulture--that Is Immortality Enough For Me. And As Much As Anyone Deserves." E.abbey

How Did Haydn And Mozart Produce Such Vast Quantities Of Formally Perfect Art? They Worked From A Perfect Formula. In Music, Beethoven Was The Great Emancipator.

Proverbs Save Us The Trouble Of Thinking. What We Call Folk Wisdom Is Often No More Than A Kind Of Expedient Stupidity.

Guns Don't Kill People; People Kill People. Of Course, People With Guns Kill More People. But That's Only Natural. It's Hard. But It's Fair.

There's Nothing So Obscene And Depressing As An American Christmas.

And If The Computer Gives You Any Back Talk, Pour Some Well-sugared Office Coffee Into Its Evil Little Silicon Brain.

In History-as-politics, The 'future' Is That Vacuum In Time Waiting To Be Filled With The Antics Of Statesmen.

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

Wilderness Begins In The Human Mind.

When The Writer Has Done His Best, He Then Should Proceed To Do His Second Best.

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?

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

Hierarchical Institutions Are Like Giant Bulldozers -- Obedient To The Whim Of Any Fool Who Takes The Controls.

We're All Undesirable Elements From Somebody's Point Of View.

The Purpose Of Love, Sex, And Marriage Is The Production And Raising Of Children. But Look About You: Most People Have No Business Having Children. They Are Unqualified, Either Genetically Or Culturally Or Both, To Reproduce Such Sorry Specimens As Themselves. Of All Our Privileges, The License To Breed Is The One Most Grossly Abused.

A Giant Thirst Is A Great Joy When Quenched In Time.

J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty -- You Can Always Tell A Shithead By That Initial Initial.

In Order To Write A Book, It Is Necessary To Sit Down (or Stand Up) And Write. Therein Lies The Difficulty.

I Would Give Ten Years Off The Beginning Of My Life To See, Only Once, Tyrannosaurus Rex Come Rearing Up From The Elms Of Central Park, A Morgan Police Horse Screaming In Its Jaws. We Can Never Have Enough Of Nature.

Beauty Is Only Skin Deep; Ugliness Goes All The Way Through.

Beauty Is Only Skin Deep

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

A Cowboy Is A Hired Hand On The Middle Of A Horse Contemplating The Hind End Of A Cow.

It's True: Every Time You Kill An Elk, You're Saving Some Cow's Life.

The Most Common Form Of Terrorism In The U.s.a. Is That Carried On By Bulldozers And Chain Saws.

There Never Was A Good War Or A Bad Revolution.

Why Must Love Always Be Accompanied--sooner Or Later--by Sorrow And Pain? Why Not? Because Pure Bliss Is For Pure Idiots.

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

Epitaphs For A Gravestone: 'please: No Hooliganism'; Or 'es Prohibe Se Hace Agua Aqui'; Or 'no Comment'.

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.

Saving The World Was Merely A Hobby. My *vocation* Has Been That Of Inspector Of Desert Water Holes.

A Shelf Of Classics For Our Young Adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, And _the Last Whole Earth Catalog_.

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.

We Spend More Time Working For Our Labor-saving Machines Than They Do Working For Us.

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

Appearance Versus Reality? Appearance Is Reality, God Damn It!

What Did Jesus Say To The Headwaiter At The Last Supper? 'separate Checks, Please.'

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

I Am Hopeful, Though Not Full Of Hope, And The Only Reason I Don't Believe In Happy Endings Is Because I Don't Believe In Endings.

The Moral Duty Of The Free Writer Is To Begin His Work At Home: To Be A Critic Of His Own Community, His Own Country, His Own Government, His Own Culture. The More Freedom The Writer Possesses, The Greater The Moral Obligation To Play The Role Of Critic.

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

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

The Ideal Society Can Be Described, Quite Simply, As That In Which No Man Has The Power Of Means To Coerce Others.

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.

There Is A Wine Called Easy Days And Mellow Nights, Well-known On The Outskirts Of The Navajo Reservation. It Is An Economical Wine, Fortified With The Best Of Intentions, And I Recommend It To Every Serious Wino.

A World Without Open Country Would Be Universal Jail.

The National Parks Belong To Everyone. To The People. To All Of Us. The Government Keeps Saying So And Maybe, In This One Case At Least, The Government Is Telling The Truth. Hard To Believe, But Possible.

When The Philosopher's Argument Becomes Tedious, Complicated, And Opaque, It Is Usually A Sign That He Is Attempting To Prove As True To The Intellect What Is Plainly False To Common Sense.

Girls: I Never Wanted Them All. Just All The Ones I Wanted.

No Man Likes To Be Smoked Out Of His Hole In February.

The One Great Gift To Humankind From Our Nuclear Physicists Has Been The Nuclear Bomb. How Can We Ever Thank Them?

Every Moment Is Precious. And Precarious.

Has Joy Any Survival Value In The Operations Of Evolution? I Suspect That It Does; I Suspect That The Morose And Fearful Are Doomed To Quick Extinction. Where There Is No Joy There Can Be No Courage; And Without Courage All Other Virtues Are Useless.

It Is Always Dishonest For A Reviewer To Review The Author Instead Of The Author's Book.

The Great Question Of Life Is Not The Question Of Death But The Question Of Life. Fear Of Death Shames Us All.

The Dog's Life Is A Good Life, For A Dog.

Shakespeare Wrote Great Poetry And Preposterous Plays. Who Really Cares, For Example, Which Petty Tyrant Rules Milan? Or Who Succeeds To The Throne Of Denmark? Or Why The Barons Ganged Up On Richard Ii?

Congress Is Always Willing To Appropriate Money For More And Bigger Paved Roads, Anywhere -- Particularly If They Form Loops.

The World Of Employer And Employee, Like That Of Master And Slave, Debases Both.

Are People More Important Than The Grizzly Bear? Only From The Point Of View Of Some People.

The Rebel Is Doomed To A Violent Death. The Rest Of Us Can Look Forward To Sedated Expiration In A Coma Inside An Oxygen Tent, With Tubes Inserted In Every Bodily Orifice.

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

If A Man’s Imagination Were Not So Weak, So Easily Tired, If His Capacity For Wonder Not So Limited, He Would Abandon Forever Such Fantasies Of The Supernal. He Would Learn To Perceive In Water, Leaves And Silence More Than Sufficient Of The Absolute And Marvelous, More Than Enough To Console Him For The Loss Of The Ancient Dream.

Though Men Now Possess The Power To Dominate And Exploit Every Corner Of The Natural World, Nothing In That Fact Implies That They Have The Right Or The Need To Do So.

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

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

God Is A Sound People Make When They're Too Tired To Think Anymore.

As Between The Skulking And Furtive Poacher, Who Hunts For The Sake Of Meat, And The Honest Gentleman Shooter, Who Kills For The Pleasure Of Sport, I Find The Former A Higher Type Of Humanity.

What Is The Purpose Of The Giant Sequoia Tree? The Purpose Of The Giant Sequoia Tree Is To Provide Shade For The Tiny Titmouse.

Anarchism Is Democracy Taken Seriously.

Though I've Lived In The Rural West Most Of My Life, I Never Once Fell In Love With A Horse. Not Once. Neither End.

A Venturesome Minority Will Always Be Eager To Set Off On Their Own, And No Obstacles Should Be Placed In Their Path; Let Them Take Risks, For Godsake, Let Them Get Lost, Sunburnt, Stranded, Drowned, Eaten By Bears, Buried Alive Under Avalanches - That Is The Right And Privilege Of Any Free American.

Doctrines Like Christianity Or Islam Or Marxism Require Unanimity Of Belief. One Dissenter Casts Doubt On The Creed Of Millions.

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.

Style: There Is Something In Too Much Verbal Felicity (as In Joyce Or Nabokov Or Borges) That Can Betray The Writer Into Technique For The Sake Of Technique.

Might Does Not Make Right But It Sure Makes What Is.

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.

Yes, There Are Plenty Of Heroes And Heroines Everywhere You Look. They Are Not Famous People. They Are Generally Obscure And Modest People Doing Useful Work, Keeping Their Families Together And Taking An Active Part In The Health Of Their Communities, Opposing What Is Evil (in One Way Or Another) And Defending What Is Good. Heroes Do Not Want Power Over Others.

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.

Tee Vee Football: One Team Wins, One Team Loses -- They Tie -- Who Cares? And Why?

All We Have, It Seems To Me, Is The Beauty Of Art And Nature And Life, And The Love Which That Beauty Inspires.

Nature And Life

Literature, Like Anything Else, Can Become A Wearisome Business If You Make A Lifetime Specialty Of It. A Healthy, Wholesome Man Would No More Spend His Entire Life Reading Great Books Than He Would Packing Cookies For Nabisco.

A Good Book Is A Kind Of Paper Club, Serving To Rouse The Slumbrous And To Silence The Obtuse.

Jane Austen: Getting Into Her Books Is Like Getting In Bed With A Cadaver. Something Vital Is Lacking; Namely, Life.

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.

Sentiment Without Action Is The Ruin Of The Soul.

Women Who Love Only Women May Have A Good Point.

I Have Been A Lucky Man. But Someone Has To Be.

All Governments Require Enemy Governments.

In The Modern Technoindustrial Culture, It Is Possible To Proceed From Infancy Into Senility Without Ever Knowing Manhood.

I'm In Favor Of Animal Liberation. Why? Because I'm An Animal.

Art, Science, Philosophy, Religion -- Each Offers At Best Only A Crude Simplification Of Actual Living Experience.

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.

Anywhere, Anytime, I'd Sacrifice The Finest Nuance For A Laugh, The Most Elegant Trope For A Smile.

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

We Live In A Society In Which It Is Normal To Be Sick; And Sick To Be Abnormal.

If There's Anyone Still Present Whom I've Failed To Insult . . . I Apologize.

No Man Is Wise Enough To Be Another Man's Master. Each Man's As Good As The Next -- If Not A Damn Sight Better.

Chastity Is More A State Of Mind Than Of Anatomy.

God Is Love? Not Bloody Likely.

Men Love Their Ideas More Than Their Lives. And The More Preposterous The Idea, The More Eager They Are To Die For It. And To Kill For It.

This World May Be Only Illusion -- But It's The Only Illusion We've Got.

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

Writing On The Wall: Will Trade Three Blind Crabs For Two With No Teeth.

Why Do I Live In The Desert? Because The Desert Is The *locus Dei*.

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

Reply To Plato: I Seen Horses I Seen Cows I Haint Never Yet Seen Horsiness Nor That There Bovinity Neither.

Pure Science Is A Myth: Both Mathematical Theoreticians Like Albert Einstein And Practical Crackpots Like Henry Ford Dealt With Different Aspects Of The Same World.

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

Humans Were Free Before The Word Freedom Became Necessary.

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

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

Music Clouds The Intellect But Clarifies The Heart.

The Very Poor Are Strictly Materialistic. It Takes Money To Be A Mystic.

For Women, The Sexual Act Is A Means To A Higher End. For A Man, It Is An End In Itself.

There Are Only Two Kinds Of Books -- Good Books And The Others. The Good Are Winnowed From The Bad Through The Democracy Of Time.

Edmund Wilson Was Our Greatest American Literary Critic Because He Was More Than A Literary Critic: He Was A Fearless, Even Radical Judge Of The Society He Lived In. (see, For Example, _a Piece Of My Mind_; _the Cold War And The Income Tax_; The Introduction To _patriotic Gore_.) Our Conventional Critics Cannot Forgive Him For Those Scandalous Lapses In Good Taste.

I Despise My Own Nation Most. Because I Know It Best. Because I Still Love It, Suffering From Hope. For Me, That's Patrotism.

The Real Work Of Men Was Hunting Meat. The Invention Of Agriculture Was A Giant Step In The Wrong Direction, Leading To Serfdom, Cities, And Empire. From A Race Of Hunters, Artists, Warriors, And Tamers Of Horses, We Degraded Ourselves To What We Are Now: Clerks, Functionaries, Laborers, Entertainers, Processors Of Information.

Spartacus, Like Jesus, Was Also Crucified By The Romans. And For Equally Good Reasons.

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.

The Longest Journey Begins With A Single Step, Not With The Turn Of An Ignition Key. That’s The Best Thing About Walking, The Journey Itself. It Doesn’t Much Matter Whether You Get Where You’re Going Or Not. You’ll Get There Anyway. Every Good Hike Brings You Eventually Back Home. Right Where You Started.

Life Is Too Tragic For Sadness: Let Us Rejoice.

Most Of What We Call The Classics Of World Literature Suggest Artifacts In A Wax Museum. We Have To Hire And Pay Professors To Get Them Read And Talked About.

World Literature

If, As Some Say, Evil Lies In The Hearts And Not The Institutions Of Men, Then There's Hardly A Distinction Worth Making Between, Say, Hitler's Germany And Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.

Opera: I Like It, Except For All Those Howling Sopranos And Caterwauling Tenors. (why Can't Tenors Sing Like Men?)

Without Courage, All Other Virtues Are Useless.

Life Is Cruel? Compared To What?

Nobody Has So Many Friends That He Can Afford To Lose One.

Music Begins Where Words Leave Off. Music Expresses The Inexpressible. If There Is A Kingdom Of Heaven, It Lies In Music.

My Aunt Ida At Age Eighty-three: 'yeah,' She Said, 'i'll Be Dead Pretty Soon. And Frankly, I Don't Give A Damn.'

Except For The Scale Of The Operation, There Was Nothing Unusual About Hitler's Massacre Of The Jews. Genocide's An Old Tradition, As Human As Mother Love Or Cherry Pie.

Defiance Is Beautiful. The Defiance Of Power, Especially Great Or Overwhelming Power, Exalts And Glorifies The Rebel.

Lightning Streaks Like Gunfire Through The Clouds, Volleys Of Thunder Shake The Air.

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?

Great Art Is Indefinable But That's All Right; It Exists Anyway.

May Your Trails Be Crooked, Winding, Lonesome, Dangerous, Leading To The Most Amazing View. May Your Mountains Rise Into And Above The Clouds.

Susan Sontag: What She Really Wanted, Throughout Her Career, Was To Grow Up To Be A Frenchman.

Reason Has Seldom Failed Us Because It Has Seldom Been Tried.

The Only Thing Worse Than A Knee-jerk Liberal Is A Knee-pad Conservative.

Knee Jerk Reactions

A Man Without Passion Would Be Like A Body Without A Soul. Or Even More Grotesque, Like A Soul Without A Body.

My Cousin Elroy Spent Seven Years As An Ibm Taper Staring At Think Signs On The Walls Before He Finally Got A Good Idea: He Quit.

Humankind Will Not Be Free Until The Last Kremlin Commissar Is Strangled With The Entrails Of The Last Pentagon Chief Of Staff.

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

We Know This Apodictic Rock Beneath Our Feet. That Dogmatic Sun Above Our Heads. The World Of Dreams, The Agony Of Love And The Foresight Of Death. That Is All We Know. And All We Need To Know? Challenge That Statement.

The World Is Older And Bigger Than We Are. This Is A Hard Truth For Some Folks To Swallow.

King Arthur And His Armored Goons Of The Round Table Functioned As The Politburo Of A Slave State: Camelot. Of All Who Have Written On The Matter Of Arthur, From Malory To White, Only Mark Twain Understood This. But Mark Twain Was A Great Writer.

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

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.

If Wilderness Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Can Save Wilderness.

I Would Prefer To Write About Everything; What Else Is There? But One Must Be Selective.

Little Boys Love Machines; Girls Adore Horses; Grown-up Men And Women Like To Walk.

If America Could Be, Once Again, A Nation Of Self-reliant Farmers, Craftsmen, Hunters, Ranchers, And Artists, Then The Rich Would Have Little Power To Dominate Others. Neither To Serve Nor To Rule: That Was The American Dream.

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

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

A Leader Leads From In Front, By The Power Of Example. A Ruler Pushes From Behind, By Means Of The Club, The Whip, The Power Of Fear.

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

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.

War? The One War I'd Be Happy To Join Is The War Against Officers.

Beware Of The Man Who Has No Enemies.

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

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.

My Computer Tells Me That In Twenty-five Years There Will Be No More Computers.

The Majority Of American Writers Today Have Chosen Passive Non-resistance To Things As They Are, Producing Sloughs Of Poetry About Their Personal Angst And Anomie, Cascades Of Short Stories And Rivers Of Novels Obsessed With The Nuances Of Domestic Relationships - Suburban Hanky-panky - Chic Boutique Shopping Mall Literary Soap Opera. When They Do Speak Out On Matters Of Controversy They Attack Not The Evils Of Our Time But Fellow Writers Who May Insist On Complaining.

Life Without Music Would Be An Intolerable Insult.

Life Without Music

I Am Happy To Be A Regional Writer. My Region Is The American West, Old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, The Human Heart, And The Male Groin.

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.

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