Edward Abbey Quotes & Sayings

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals. — Edward Abbey

There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution. — Edward Abbey

Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society. — Edward Abbey

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

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations. — Edward Abbey

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break ... I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun. — Edward Abbey

And the wind blows, the dust clouds darken the desert blue, pale sand and red dust drift across the asphalt trails and tumbleweeds fill the arroyos. Good-bye, come again. (p. 34) — Edward Abbey

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

Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II? — Edward Abbey

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice. — Edward Abbey

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority. — Edward Abbey

Wordless, it rises and falls in hemidemisemitones of unearthly misery. The dirge of the damned — Edward Abbey

The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. — Edward Abbey

Life's a dog and then you die? No no. Life is a joyous dance through daffodils beneath cerulean blue skies and then, then what? I forget what happens next.
-A Fool's Progress — Edward Abbey

Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one. — Edward Abbey

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks. — Edward Abbey

At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, "thus far and no further." If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, "If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour. — Edward Abbey

Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game — Edward Abbey

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

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. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

I believe that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, possibly even in our lifetime, and that a majority of us (if prepared) will muddle through to a freer, more open, less crowded, green and spacious agrarian society. (Maybe; of course it may be only a repeat of the middle ages.) — Edward Abbey

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them. — Edward Abbey

A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers. — Edward Abbey

Grow a beard, take a bath, burn a billboard — Edward Abbey

Old foot trails may be neglected, back-country ranger stations left unmanned, and interpretive and protective services inadequately staffed, but the administrators know from long experience that millions for asphalt can always be found; Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere - particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry - they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started. — Edward Abbey

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_. — Edward Abbey

A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger. — Edward Abbey

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method. — Edward Abbey

So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probly be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes. — Edward Abbey

Those who dream of the joys of living in a space colony should live in a space colony. — Edward Abbey

Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits. — Edward Abbey

If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy ... Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid. — Edward Abbey

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

I stand for what I stand on. — Edward Abbey

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him. — Edward Abbey

The new dam, of course, will improve things. If ever filled it will back water to within sight of the Bridge, transforming what was formerly an adventure into a routine motorboat excursion. Those who see it then will not understand that half the beauty of Rainbow Bridge lay in its remoteness, its relative difficulty of access, and in the wilderness surrounding it, of which it was an integral part. When these aspects are removed the Bridge will be no more than an isolated geological oddity, an extension of that museumlike diorama to which industrial tourism tends to reduce the natural world. — Edward Abbey

Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble. — Edward Abbey

There are only two living American authors fully deserving of the Nobel Prize. One is Lewis Mumford. The other is Wallace Stegner, whose novels and essays provide us a comprehensive portrait of industrial society in all its glittering corruption and radiant evil. — Edward Abbey

One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city
as I once did for a couple of years. — Edward Abbey

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. — Edward Abbey

The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic. — Edward Abbey

I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I'll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I've had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript. [Regarding "The Monkey Wrench Gang"] — Edward Abbey

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste. — Edward Abbey

I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. — Edward Abbey

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront. — Edward Abbey

What is truth? I don't know and I'm sorry I brought it up. — Edward Abbey

Paradise is the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God bless America, the Earth upon which we stand. — Edward Abbey

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff. — Edward Abbey

One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium. — Edward Abbey

What I am really writing about, what I have always written about, is the idea of human freedom, human community, the real world which makes both possible, and the new technocratic industrial state which threatens the existence of all three. Life and death, that's my subject, and always has been - if the reader will look beyond the assumptions of lazy critics and actually read what I have written. Which also means, quite often, reading between the lines: I am a comic writer and the generation of laughter is my aim. — Edward Abbey

The moment I stepped out the front door I was faced again with Manhattan. There it was, oh splendid ship of concrete and steel, aluminum, glass and electricity, forging forever up the dark river. (The hudson - like a river of oil, filthy and rich, gleaming with silver lights.) Manhattan at twilight: floating gardens of tender neon, the lavender towers where each window glittered at sundown with reflected incandescence, where each crosstown street became at evening a gash of golden fire, and the endless flow of the endless traffic on the West Side Highway resembled a luminous necklace strung round the island's shoulders. — Edward Abbey

WEALTH AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT:
Let us define the wealthy man as he who has everything he desires. How to reach that happy condition? Two ways — Edward Abbey

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

These various interests are well organized, command more wealth than most modern nations, and are represented in Congress with a strength far greater than is justified in any constitutional or democratic sense. (Modern politics is expensive - power follows money.) — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert. — Edward Abbey

I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not
realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow. — Edward Abbey

Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be
a man. — Edward Abbey

I will not. I will never surrender. I will fight through to the finsh, whatever the outcome. I will not quit. I will not betray and desert the best thing in my life. No, no, I will not surrender...Earth is the place for love. — Edward Abbey

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. — Edward Abbey

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political
especially that which pretends not to be. — Edward Abbey

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others? — Edward Abbey

Simplicity is always a virtue. — Edward Abbey

The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do. — Edward Abbey

The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture. — Edward Abbey

Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music. — Edward Abbey

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

The mountains loomed over the valley like a psychical presence, a source and mirror of nervous influences, emotions, subtle and unlabeled aspirations; no man could ignore that presence; in an underground poker game, in the vaults of the First National Bank, in the secret chambers of The Factory, in the backroom of the realtor's office during the composition of an intricate swindle, in the heart of a sexual embrace, the emanations of mountain and sky imprinted some analogue of their nature on the evolution and shape of every soul. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously. — Edward Abbey

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today. — Edward Abbey

There is a kind of poetry in simple fact. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. — Edward Abbey

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

Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses. — Edward Abbey

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition. — Edward Abbey

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height. — Edward Abbey

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. — Edward Abbey

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist. — Edward Abbey

To aid and abet in the destruction of a single species or in the extermination of a single tribe is to commit a crime against God, a mortal sin against Mother Nature. Better by far to sacrifice in some degree the interests of mechanical civilization, curtail our gluttonous appetite for things, ever more things, learn to moderate our needs, and most important, and not difficult, learn to control, limit and gradually reduce our human numbers. We humans swarm over the planet like a plague of locusts, multiplying and devouring. There is no justice, sense or decency in this mindless global breeding spree, this obscene anthropoid fecundity, this industrialized mass production of babies and bodies, ever more bodies and babies. The man-centered view of the world in anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinature, antilife, and
antihuman. — Edward Abbey

The desert wears ... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting
but waiting for what? — Edward Abbey

I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else's. I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore. — Edward Abbey

I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man; not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied, to the worship of technique and technology, and to that perversion of science properly called scientism; and not to civilization but to culture. — Edward Abbey

When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it. — Edward Abbey

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 ... — Edward Abbey

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight. — Edward Abbey