In the Far East, we look at life in terms of circles. In the West, they look at life more in terms of squares and rectangles.
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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.
I'm not a traditional sonero, at least not in the way they want me to be, I'm an interpreter, and I reach people in a different level.
That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.
We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.
There's no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books.