17 Quotes by Rinker Buck

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.

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?

The endurance required should have been too much for us, but across these Nebraska plains endurance just begat more endurance.

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.

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.

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

This became our creed, almost a religious faith. Nobody knows and we would have to figure everything out ourselves.

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.