Quotes from Louis L'Amour

If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.

A ship does not sail with yesterday's wind.

Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long.

Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.

No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.

I'm sorry! I really am! I wanted to get out of this place! I want to live! I want to get away from here and never see it again! I hate everything about it! You will hate the next place, too, I said. What you are you will carry with you.

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.

To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.

A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realists, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very old or very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads.

when guns are outlawed only the outlaws will have guns.

Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.

Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy.

Out here you better have a gun, and a gun in the wagon ain't good for nothin'. I believe what the old Quaker said, 'Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.

It is not enough to do, one must also become. I wish to be wiser, stronger, better. This-- I held out my hands --this thing that is me is incomplete. It is only the raw material with which I have to work. I want to make it better than I received it.

Personally, I do not believe the human mind has any limits but those we impose ourselves.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do

No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.

One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.

In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.

The terrorist lives for terror, not for the change he tells himself he wants. He masks his desire to kill and destroy behind the curtain of a cause. It is destruction he wants, not creation.

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.