People will do as they are told by someone who outranks them, but they will only follow someone they believe in.
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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.
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
We simply need that wild country available to us. . . For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions other than adjustments. Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the Universal, or that which has nothing external to derange it.
I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.
On his contract negotiations with the Devils: It's beyond money at this point. They're not even treating him as a member of their family, unless it's a dysfunctional family.
We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.