Author: James Wesley Rawles

“Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.” – Gen. Robert Baden Powell

“The store customer, who comes home with a package under his arm has learned nothing, except that a ten dollar bill is a source of power in the market place. The man or woman who has converted material into needed products via tools and skills has matured in the process.” – Helen Nearing, The Good Life (Helen and Scott Nearing’s Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living)  

“You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.”  – Theodore Roosevelt

“His neighbor is a tooth-drawer. That bag at his girdle is full of the teeth that he drew at Winchester fair. I warrant that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work and a trifle dim in the eye.” – Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company

“I’m pretty busy these days with ‘normal’ stuff, but there’s always that little voice in the back of the head that says ‘Hey…stay frosty, man. Today could be The Day.’ It’s really easy to get lax when there’s electricity, hot water, and a fridge full of food at hand. All of that can change like that (:::snaps fingers:::) But, still, it’s hard to stay focused sometimes. I’ve been cleaning up the ‘extra’ guns and getting them ready for the Deep Sleep. Basically it’s a very detailed cleaning, a generous amount of lubrication, and seal it up in a Pelican case …

“We’ve forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We’ve ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore.” – Richard Matheson, in “The …

“Let me say for the record, Mr. Speaker, not one human death or injury resulting from a grizzly bear attack is acceptable to this Congressman. In fact, it should not be accepted by anyone who values human life. I do not want to have to stand up before a spouse, a parent, a child, brother, or sister who have lost their loved one because of a rare occurring brutal grizzly bear attack and explain that this tragedy would not have occurred had we not introduced this dangerous animal into Idaho in the first place.” – Congressmember Helen Chenoweth