Edward Abbey Quotes

But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountain than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes into the sand I made contact with that larger world - an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak - there were no other people around and there still are none - but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountains and I felt, as I feel - is it a paradox? - that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself.

Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.

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.

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?

Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats.

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.

Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.

My friends and I live in the American SW because we love it, and love it for its own sake - not merely because it's the last region of the forty-eight states to be buried under asphalt and greed.

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.

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

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace
a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.

All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.

The automobile, which began as a transportation convenience, has become a bloody tyrant (50,000 lives a year), and it is the responsibility of the park service, as well as that of everyone else concerned with preserving both wilderness and civilization, to begin a campaign of resistance.

If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new or some truth so very old we have all forgotten it.

How can I be so evil? It ain't easy.

My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: 'Yeah,' she said, 'I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn.'

But for the time being, around my place at least, the air is untroubled, and I become aware for the first time today of the immense silence in which I am lost. Not a silence so much as a great stillness - for there are a few sounds: the creak of some bird in a juniper tree, an eddy of wind which passes and fades like a sigh, the ticking of the watch on my wrist- slight noises which break the sensation of absolute silence but at the same time exaggerate my sense of the surrounding, overwhelming peace. A suspension of time, a continuous present.

You can never go wrong cuttin' fence,' repeated Smith, warming to his task. (Pling!) "Always cut fence. That's the law west of the 100th meridian. East of that don't matter none. Back there it's all lost anyhow. But west, we cut fence,' (Plang!)

Reason is and ought to be, as Hume said, the slave of the passions.

Wilderness, wilderness ... We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.

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

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

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.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

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

You can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamn contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe
fear and awe of the State.

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.

Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.

I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.

Life: another day, another dolor.

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

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

Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere
particularly if they form loops.

SHUT THE MILK UP ABBEY hahaha something with the fam.

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.

Grown men do not need leaders.

Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.

The best American writers have come from the hinterlands
Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.

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

The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of the sun, good wine and a rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with a guitar and lousy old cowboy songs. Despair: I'll never be a scholar, never be a decent good Christian. Just a hedonist, a pagan, a primitive romantic

Simplicity is always a virtue.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people - the following preparations would be essential:

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

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.

Keep the tourists out, some tourist from Salt Lake City has written. As fellow tourists we heartily agree.

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.

All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.

Wilderness and motors are incompatible and the former can best be experienced, understood and enjoyed when the machines are left behind where they belong
on the superhighways and in the parking lots, on the reservoirs and in the marinas.

Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

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

But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to 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 eyes to see.

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.

The gross evil of our time defies all labels.

The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.

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.

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

And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.

Every moment is precious. And precarious.

All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love
and most of all, an audience!

Life without music would be an intolerable insult.

I might also say, regarding reviews and reviewers, that I have yet to read a review of any of my own books which I could not have written much better myself.

Gluttony - that's my vice & curse. I want too much of everything. Books ... Love ... Music ... Color & Form ... Philosophy ... Travel & Adventure ... the result of this bestial lust is the indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of my energies - wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.

The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.

Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.

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.

A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches - that is the right and privilege of any free American.

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

The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.

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

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

It is vital that we avoid any hint of moral superiority in our dealings with one another in the environmental movement; if it developed into factionalism it would destroy us, as factionalism has destroyed so many other progressive movements in America.

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

Beyond the wall of the unreal city ... there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then
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.

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

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.

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.

We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.

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.

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

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.