People From Iowa

"Conrad's name strikes fear in the hearts of men all over the world. Where there is corruption, greed or hypocrisy, everyone says, 'This is a job for Conrad.'"

"Editorial cartoonists are idealists, of another world. Political, social and moral injustices are perceived as monstrosities [requiring the cartoonist to] sweep aside all the complexities and go to the basic issue; to take suspicions, coincidences and past events and record them larger than life."

"I don't see a great deal in editorial cartooning today, and neither do the editors. Damn few of them want cartoons that say something that should be said, politically, that is. As long as that continues, cartoonists are going to be in bad shape, but not as bad shape as the publishers and owners of the newspapers will be in when the people realize they're not reading anything."

"Throughout our history - and that of the world - it's always come down to the friction between the haves and have-nots or between the average Joes and the large corporations. So that's a recurring theme in my work."

"Cartoons are ridicule and satire by definition. A negative attitude is the nature of the art."

"Nobody ever accused me of being objective."

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it."

"It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now."

"It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has."

"There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences."

"If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea."

"The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe."

"It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs."

"These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

"At a high level of universality, to write anything well, whether it be intellectual or imaginative, is to assume at least two obligations: to be intelligible and to be interesting. Intelligibility, too, has its levels of obligation, on the lowest of individual statements, and even on this level the obligation is never easy to fulfill and perhaps even to genius could be a nightmare if what the genius sought to represent was “madness.” Only to a limited degree, however, can individual statements be intelligible — and in many instances and for a variety of reasons the individual statements are meant to be obscure, as in “mad” speeches. Since full intelligibility depends upon the relations of individual statement to individual statement, the concept of intelligibility, fully expanded, includes order and completeness; for a fully intelligible exposition or poem having relations has parts, and all the parts ought to be there and add up to a whole. The second major obligation, that of being “interesting,” includes unexpectedness and suspense, for expository as well as imaginative writing should not be merely what the reader expected it would be — or why should it be written or read? — and the unexpected should not be immediately and totally announced (in other words, expository and imaginative writing should have suspense), for, if the whole is immediately known, why should the writer or reader proceed farther? But the accomplished writer gives his selected material more than shape — he gives it proper size. For a piece of writing to have its proper size is an excellent thing, or otherwise it would be lacking in intelligibility or interest or both."

"There is not a writer in the world who will not jump with the shock of recognition when Maclean discerns iambic pentameter in the business of the whorehouse, a second epiphany when everything heard sorted itself into rhythms. … Here Maclean, at seventeen, becomes conscious of the shape of language, the way it falls on the ear. In that whorehouse, ill, dazed, and swimming in and out of consciousness, he became the writer who bloomed fifty-odd years later."

"This was Norman’s remarkable ability — to imagine how highly sophisticated philosophical and critical ideas continually relate to our everyday life. This remarkable synthesis of the intellectual and the practical pervades his writing, transforming the experiences he had in the midst of western mountains and rivers into paradigms of human life and thus accomplishing the ultimate goal of fiction."

"It shouldn't be hard to imagine just what most of the crew must have thought when they first looked across the open hill-side and saw their boss seemingly playing with a matchbook in dry grass. Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the Smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy, the one in which their crew suffered almost a total loss and the only one in which their loss came from the fire itself. It is also the only fire any member of the Forest Service had ever seen or heard of in which the foreman got out ahead of his crew only to light a fire in advance of the fire he and his crew were trying to escape. In case I hadn't understood him the first time, Sallee repeated, "We thought he must have gone nuts." A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still, when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him."

"A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help."

"Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts — hopefully, even the arch to the sky."

"In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them."

""From the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains," Captain Lewis said in his journals. Its singular appearance makes it a fitting backdrop for early and everlasting drama in which nature plays the leading role."

"Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone. It was now one of those moments when nothing remains but an opening in the sky and a story — and maybe something of a poem. Anyway, as you possibly remember, there are these lines in front of the story:"

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash."

"Help," he said "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly."

"The brain gives up a lot less easily than the body."

"Painted on one side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana."

"My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."

"As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.""

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."

"Scholars are still in search of the exact meaning of certain speeches in each of Shakespeare’s great tragedies — and we should like to assume that those who saw these plays for the first time did not have perfect understanding of all of the lines — but so great was Shakespeare’s power to conceive of action from which thought and feeling can be readily inferred that all of us know Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth more intimately than we know many men whose remarks we understand perfectly."

"The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with."

"The frontier that remains is is the interior one, the most forbidding and mysterious frontier."

"Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."

"The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old."

"A great nation's foreign policy involves power, money, trade, oil and arms, but it proeeds from ideas."

"It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant."

"Foreign policy deals across time as well as space."

"The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well."

"One cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen."

"These choices by small countries are vital for them, but may be more momentous than commonly understood for others as well, including the major powers, who presumptuously believe they are in control of events."

"The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years."

"But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think."

"The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres."

"The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer."

"We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth."

"Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans."

"For four hundred years European civilization has dominated the world - for better or for worse. It is convenient, and flattering, for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it very rash to do so."