Edward abbey quotes

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

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

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.

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

Why must love always be accompanied--sooner or later--by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots.

When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.

Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.

Every moment is precious. And precarious.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

Without courage, all other virtues are useless.

The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.

The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone - and to no one.

Walking takes longer... 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.

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.

Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.

If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.

And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a "surly, illmannered, badtempered fellow." ... Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.

The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.

A world without open country would be universal jail.

The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

All governments require enemy governments.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

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.

Grown men do not need leaders.

The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe.

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

‎"If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture--that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." E.Abbey

I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.

I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.

Freedom begins between the ears.

In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.

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.

To be alive is to take risks; to be always safe and secure is death.

My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are -- retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.

God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.

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.

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.

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

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.

Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.

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

The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.

I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.

I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars.

The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.

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

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information.

Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it.

Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.

There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.

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

Let us hope our weapons are never needed - but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

Women who love only women may have a good point.

If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult . . . I apologize.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.

Why this cult of wilderness?... because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

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

May your rivers flow without end... down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs... where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

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.

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.

In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.

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.

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

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... To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.

Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?

New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?

Beware of the man who has no enemies.

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

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

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?

Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.

The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.

The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself - not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.

An empty man is full of himself.

Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic....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.

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.

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.