"Individual liberty. It is the only thing that matters… I have but a single conviction or ideal,or whateverthehell it might be called: individual liberty. It's the only thing that matters a damn. I'd rather be a naked savage, shivering, starving, freezing, hunted by wild beasts and enemies, but free to go and come, with the range of the earth to roam, than the fattest, richest, most bedecked slave in a golden palace with the crustal fountains, silken divans, and ivory-bosomed dancing girls of Haroun al Raschid."
Restraints of Civilization..."Don't you realize that the freedom of the West meant more than lack of restraint by law? It meant freedom from crushing taxes, from crowds, the hurry and rush of urban life, from the monotony of the sweat-shop or the office, from never-varying routine, from snobbery and from being merely a cog in the machine"
I want, in a word, the frontier … land rich and unbroken and virgin, swarming with game and laden with fresh forests and sweet cold streams, where a man could live by the sweat of his hands unharried by taxes, crowds, noise, unemployment, bank-failures, gang-extortions, laws, and all the other wearisome things of civilization.
On the frontier, there were men that were real men… "A man is only a man, regardless of how many books he has read, or written. Neither wealth nor erudition gives him any more fundamental rights than is due any man. That’s why I love the memory of the frontier; there a man was not judged by what he had or what he knew, but by what he was."