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.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.

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.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

People start to lie more once they start to care less.

If this is the freedom you speak of... I want no part of it.

How come they get to be gray-haired and still in love with each other, while Lilly tears out what's left of my heart and dumps it into her Jill-The-Ripper shredder?

I feel like knowledge is power: If you know how to take care of yourself, you can be a better version of yourself.

Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them.

Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

I don't read blogs, I don't have MySpace, I don't have Facebook or Twitter - none of that.

I've never known what I've wanted to do. I've never planned anything in my life.

I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.