Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson. "An Address." Collected in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.
—Richard Feynman. "Letter to Mark Minguillon, 23 April 1976." Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track.
Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
—Aldo Leopold. "The Green Lagoons." Collected in A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation.
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
—Edward Abbey. The Monkey Wrench Gang.
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn't have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.
This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.
Well—I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
—Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard.
Transmission problem. Can't get my ass in gear.
—Edward Abbey. "Letter to Doug Peacock, December 1986." Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
—Kurt Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions.
It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.
—Mark Twain. "Chapter V." Following the Equator.
It is easier to devise a scheme of this character at one's writing-table than it is to carry it out.
—Sven Hedin. "The Plan and Objects of My Journey." Through Asia.