Quotes from Rinker Buck

I do not believe in organized religion, herbal remedies, yoga, Reiki, kabbalah, deep massage, slow food, or chicken soup for the soul. The nostrums of Deepak Chopra and Barbara De Angelis cannot rescue people like me. I believe in crazyass passion.

All I am saying is that sometimes you're doing quite a lot by not doing anything. You're not quitting. You just keep going. That's the pioneer spirit.

History almost everywhere is tragic and ironic, but in America the contrasts are more stark because we set such high ideals.

I was having a great time, enjoying the best summer of my life, fucked up. Fucked up is good.

The cops of America are poster-boys of low self-esteem. Their uniforms, silly hats, and sparkling patent leather girdles freighted down with shiny handcuffs, walkie-talkies, and spray canisters of Mace apparently do not make them feel secure enough, so they always add the hostile interrogation to make sure that the accosted citizens know who is in charge.

Crazyass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force. Without them, you cannot cross the trail.

In modern life we move from one insulated igloo to another...serially abstracting ourselves from nature and its impacts.

All the heroes had crew cuts, platinum-blond wives and drove Corvettes. The media was devoted to this cult of innocence.

Americans were those folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything. Allegedly

Riding across Nebraska in a covered wagon was a monthlong immersion therapy in kindness, a reminder of the essential decency of my country.

The Americans today who like to whine all the time because they say that taxes are too high and that government costs too much should leave their television sets behind for a while and go out and see the country they live in.

Seeing America slowly was, in a way, like eating slow food-I wasn't covering much ground in a single day, but I was digesting a lot more.

Americans were folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything.

And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced—mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes—would miraculously vanish from the trail for me?

Historians have long been squeamish about acknowledging that General Washington, like many of the American founders, was a voracious land speculator. Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump.

Fucked up is the universal condition of man. We were crossing to Oregon behind a cranky team of mules—the very definition, the apotheosis, the pinnacle, of fucked up. I woke in the morning to harness mules, fucked up, obsessed all day on making more miles, fucked up, and collapsed onto my squalid wagon matteess every night, fucked up. I was having a great time, enjoying the best summer of my life, fucked up. Fucked up is good.

I was comfortable about my own western quest. The wrong outcome, or no outcome at all, is often the only result of a journey. Walkabouts and odysseys have always been common, and we needn't search too hard for tangible returns. Journey for journey's sake is enough. For weeks or months of a climb or a trek, we are forced to be in the moment.

Until I read about it nearly twenty years later, in a book about instrument flying, I didn't realize that I suffered throughout our flight from something called copilot vertigo. The phenomenon is especially severe in tandem-seat designs like Cubs, where visibility over the pilot in front is limited.

A wave of bipolar disorders and addiction to video games and gambling has also taken a toll on families.

Don looked up from his plate of bacon and eggs with an amused smile.

Today, roughly seven million American children live in households that include their grandparents. Almost half of these children are being raised primarily by their grandparents, a 16 percent increase over the numbers for the 2000 census.

Missouri, a critical frontier state, prospered for many reasons—good soil, river access, fast-growing hardwood forests—but mostly because of mules.

Whenever you make an agreement with yourself, you have to stick to it.

Scholars have now concluded that Buffalo Bill's famous ride never happened, and in fact he was not a Pony Express rider at all.