"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in."
— Wallace Stegner

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
— Edward Abbey

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. 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. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."
— Edward Abbey

"Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top."
— Edward Abbey

"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."
— Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

"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."
— Edward Abbey

"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."
— Edward Abbey

"Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and 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 deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, 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."
— Edward Abbey

"There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated. … To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me."
— Edward Abbey

"The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers' -- the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship."
— Edward Abbey

"An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human."
— Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule other."
— Edward Abbey

"A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles."
— Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

"I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth."
— Edward Abbey

"Freedom begins between the ears."
— Edward Abbey

"You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light."
— Edward Abbey

"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."
— Edward Abbey

"Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while."
— Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

"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."
— Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire a Season In the Wildern)

"A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis."
— Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

"Resist much, obey little"
— Edward Abbey/Walt Whitman

"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are."
— Gretel Ehrlich

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream"
— Jack Kerouac

"Houses are full of things that gather dust"
— Jack Kerouac

"The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.""
— Eduardo Galeano

"I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people."
— Eduardo Galeano

"Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every color. Some people’s flames are so still they don’t even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking, and if you approach you shine in the fire."
— Eduardo Galeano

"The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show."
— Eduardo Galeano

"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
— George Orwell

"7 DEADLY SINS

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Science without humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without principle

Commerce without morality

Worship without sacrifice."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Let us read and let us dance — two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."
— Voltaire

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."
— Voltaire

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
— Voltaire

"Love truth, but pardon error"
— Voltaire

"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers"
— Voltaire

"Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day."
— Voltaire

"Dare to think for yourself."
— Voltaire

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
— Voltaire

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung. "
— Voltaire

"Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do."
— Voltaire

"Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it."
— Voltaire (Philosophical Dictionary)

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire

"We must cultivate our garden "
— Voltaire (Candide, or Optimism)

"Our labour keeps us from three great evils—boredom, vice, and want."
— Voltaire (Candide, or Optimism)

"Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination. "
— Voltaire

"Man is free at the instant he wants to be."
— Voltaire