Top 100 Edward Abbey Quotes
#1. The GDP rises whenever money changes hands ... The whole thing is reminiscent of Edward Abbey's reflection that growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.
John Robbins
#2. Out there in the middle of the maelstrom the Eater awaits, heaving and gulping, its mouth like a giant clam's . . . its mind a frenzy of beige-colored rapid foam. A horrifying uproar, all things considered. Imagine floating through that nonsense in a life jacket. - EDWARD ABBEY
Kevin Fedarko
#3. I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
Edward Abbey
#4. Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.
Edward Abbey
#5. Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.
Edward Abbey
#6. An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.
Edward Abbey
#7. In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)
Edward Abbey
#8. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
Edward Abbey
#10. You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.
Edward Abbey
#11. 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.
Edward Abbey
#12. Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.
Edward Abbey
#13. The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.
Edward Abbey
#14. There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.
Edward Abbey
#15. If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
Edward Abbey
#16. Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.
Edward Abbey
#17. Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'
Edward Abbey
#18. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.
Edward Abbey
#19. 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
#20. There is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.
Edward Abbey
#21. Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
Edward Abbey
#22. There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
Edward Abbey
#23. The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.
Edward Abbey
#24. Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.
Edward Abbey
#25. The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!
Edward Abbey
#26. The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live ...
Edward Abbey
#27. The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone and to no one.
Edward Abbey
#28. As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
Edward Abbey
#29. Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.
Edward Abbey
#30. 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.
Edward Abbey
#31. Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.
Edward Abbey
#32. Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.
Edward Abbey
#33. 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.
Edward Abbey
#34. Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much more.
Edward Abbey
#35. I'm sure as hell not going to fight over her. I got more interesting things to do than that.
There's nothing more interesting than a woman, George. Not in this world.
Edward Abbey
#36. Whenever I read _Time_ or _Newsweek_ or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?
Edward Abbey
#38. A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.
Edward Abbey
#39. Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers
obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.
Edward Abbey
#40. Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'
Edward Abbey
#41. Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
Edward Abbey
#42. To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.
Edward Abbey
#43. When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
Edward Abbey
#44. What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
Edward Abbey
#45. A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
Edward Abbey
#46. In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
Edward Abbey
#47. Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.
Edward Abbey
#48. In that moment of truce, of utter surrender, when the rabbit still alive offers no resistance but only waits, is it possible that the rabbit also loves the owl?
Edward Abbey
#49. Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.
Edward Abbey
#50. Poetry
even bad poetry
may be our final hope.
Edward Abbey
#51. Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
Edward Abbey
#52. 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
#53. Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses
they tie
who cares? And why?
Edward Abbey
#54. The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space. South
Edward Abbey
#55. The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.
Edward Abbey
#56. Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.
Edward Abbey
#57. To be alive is to take risks; to be always safe and secure is death.
Edward Abbey
#58. A life without tragedy would not be worth living. We
Edward Abbey
#59. My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward Abbey
#60. Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.
Edward Abbey
#61. In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.
Edward Abbey
#62. The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.
Edward Abbey
#63. Wherever two human beings are alive, together, and happy, there is the center of the world.
Edward Abbey
#64. Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.
Edward Abbey
#65. If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.
Edward Abbey
#66. Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.
Edward Abbey
#67. Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.
Edward Abbey
#68. It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.
Edward Abbey
#69. I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?
Edward Abbey
#70. 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.
Edward Abbey
#71. War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.
Edward Abbey
#72. I'm tired of doing what I don't want to do to live the way I don't want to live.
Edward Abbey
#73. Wordless, it rises and falls in hemidemisemitones of unearthly misery. The dirge of the damned
Edward Abbey
#74. We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.
Edward Abbey
#76. I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.
Edward Abbey
#77. Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
Edward Abbey
#78. The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners
and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
Edward Abbey
#79. Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.
Edward Abbey
#80. A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.
Edward Abbey
#81. When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
Edward Abbey
#82. I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.
Edward Abbey
#83. Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
Edward Abbey
#84. Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
Edward Abbey
#85. My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.
Edward Abbey
#86. Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.
Edward Abbey
#87. The national parks belong to everyone. To the people. To all of us. The government keeps saying so and maybe, in this one case at least, the government is telling the truth. Hard to believe, but possible.
Edward Abbey
#88. Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
Edward Abbey
#89. Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon.
Edward Abbey
#90. There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.
Edward Abbey
#91. We are caught," continued the good doctor, "in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart.
Edward Abbey
#92. Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.
Edward Abbey
#93. Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.
Edward Abbey
#94. Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.
Edward Abbey
#95. The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
Edward Abbey
#97. What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
Edward Abbey
#98. If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult ... I apologize.
Edward Abbey
#99. That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.
Edward Abbey
#100. A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.
Edward Abbey
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