75 Edward Abbey Quotes

Edward Abbey quotes

1. My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving.

2. One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.

3. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

4. We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.

5. May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

6. Without courage, all other virtues are useless.

7. This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome - there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

8. I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.

9. I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

10. All living things on earth are kindred.

11. I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. (Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!)

12. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

13. Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.

14. A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

15. Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

16. Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.

17. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may not ever need to go there.

18. To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.

19. Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.

20. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

21. There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.

22. Knowing now what we have learned, unless the need were urgent, I could no more sink the blade of an ax into the tissues of a living tree than I could drive it into the flesh of a fellow human.

23. The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.

24. The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - if only we had the eyes to see.

25. When I write 'paradise' I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.

26. Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.

27. I am not an atheist but an earthiest.

28. Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second. (p. 81)

29. Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.

30. I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.

31. Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

32. From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

33. According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but 'organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum'. I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces.

34. Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

35. Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

36. The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

37. No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

38. A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

39. Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

40. Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

41. In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.

42. The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.

43. Freedom begins between the ears.

44. The 'Terror' of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

45. Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.

46. What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money.

47. When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

48. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

49. An empty man is full of himself.

50. I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.

51. If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

52. The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.

53. God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.

54. Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers - obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.

55. One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

1. A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

2. Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote _The Golden Ass_.

3. Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.

4. By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

5. No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.

6. Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

7. Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.

8. Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

9. All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.

10. Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

11. Life: another day, another dolor.

12. The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit's weak.

13. Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

14. Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.

15. How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas.

16. There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.

17. This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.

18. May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.

19. I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.

20. Is the Archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.