Edward Abbey Quotes

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

One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only ...

My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or ...

This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief --like a whisper of ...

They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquer...

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my hone...

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true--nobody will ever...

I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and ...

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the bound...

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

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that th...

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.

Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a ...

Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or di...

But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.

Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousa...

Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even th...

In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs comp...

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, ...

In any nation but the USA, it is taken for granted that a man of distinction, ability, wealth or pow...

If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an ho...

Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much...

People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged ...

I believe that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, possibly even in our lifetime...

Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this ...

Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bomb...

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, e...

There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolu...

I'd like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzard...

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above...

Hard times are a-coming, and people without useful, practical skills are going to suffer. Or suffer ...

I hate and fear violence myself, have always avoided barroom brawls, and tho' I'm a bit of a gun-nut...

The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And ...

But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom ...

If you hope for any sort of dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or radical s...

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

How become a writer? Naturally.

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repress...

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society ...

The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Bli...

I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else's. I'm happy to respect ...

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is becau...

Not all questions can be answered.

And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic funct...

The weather here is windy, balmy, sometimes wet. Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over...

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few...

I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze o...

Let's have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence -- for a political and/o...

Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: th...

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

The gross evil of our time defies all labels.

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of li...

The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddlin...

As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

An empty man is full of himself.

Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay ...

I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to ...

The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of pe...

Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They a...

Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human bei...

Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as ...

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and o...

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

There is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

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

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

To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comr...

There was this tendency to drift. And yet  when she thought about it, what did she really want to do...

Lifting her lovely and longing face towards the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her ...

Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beaut...

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of ex...

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

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

Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

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

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a ...

If a man's imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited,...

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enem...

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

Grown men do not need leaders.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your...

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

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousan...

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' ca...

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is o...

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

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach; it is also an expressi...

As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is a...

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

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

We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with ...

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks ...

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide s...

To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; cultur...