Louis L'Amour Quotes

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.

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.

"Destarte! How musical! What does it mean?" "You can't say it except in Mescalero. It means Morning, but that isn't what it means, either. Indian words are more than just that. They also mean the feel and the sound of the name. It means like Crack of Dawn, the first bronze light that makes the buttes stand out against the gray desert. It means the first sound you hear of a brook curling over some rocks-some trout jumping and a beaver crooning. It means the sound a stallion makes when he whistles at some mares just as the first puff of wind kicks up at daybreak. "It means like you get up in the first light and you and her go out of the wickiup, where it smells smoky and private and just you and her, and kind of safe with just the two of you there, and you stand outside and smell the first bite of the wind coming down from the high divide and promising the first snowfall. Well, you just can't say what it means in English. Anyway, that was her name. Destarte.

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.

"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 little rest and meditation often saves a lot of riding over rough country.

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.

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.

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.

To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.

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.

The mind is a basket . . . if you put nothing in, you get nothing out.