Edward Abbey Quotes

How to pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth again? This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively, and which it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit. ~ Edward Abbey

We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races
by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character. ~ Edward Abbey

The only thing left worth saving is wilderness. ~ Edward Abbey

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. ~ Edward Abbey

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. ~ Edward Abbey

We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view. ~ Edward Abbey

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

The dead man's nephew, excused from this duty, walks far ahead out of earshot. We are free as we go stumbling and sweating along to say exactly what we please, without fear of offending. "Heavy son of a bitch. ... " "All blown up like he is, you'd think he'd float like a balloon." "Let's just hope he don't explode." "He won't. We let the gas out." "What about lunch?" somebody asks; "I'm hungry." "Eat this." "Why'd the bastard have to go so far from the road?" "There's something leaking out that zipper." "Never mind, let's try to get in step here," the sheriff says. "Goddamnit, Floyd, you got big feet." "Are we going in the right direction?" "I wonder if the old fart would walk part way if we let him out of that bag?" "He won't even say thank you for the ride." "Well I hope this learned him a lesson, goddamn him. I guess he'll stay put after this. ... " Thus we meditate upon the stranger's death. ~ Edward Abbey

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse. ~ Edward Abbey

What most people really desire is something quite different from industrial gimmickry- liberty, spontaneity, nakedness, mystery, wildness, wilderness. ~ Edward Abbey

A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner. ~ Edward Abbey

No end of blessings from heaven and earth. As we climb up out of the Moab valley and reach the high tableland stretching northward, traces of snow flying across the road, the sun emerges clear of the overcast, burning free on the very edge of the horizon. For a few minutes the whole region from the canyon of the Colorado to the Book Cliffs - crag, mesa, turret, dome, canyon wall, plain, swale and dune - glows with a vivid amber light against the darkness on the east. At the same time I see a mountain peak rising clear of the clouds, old Tukuhnikivats fierce as the Matterhorn, snowy as Everest, invincible. "Ferris, stop this car. Let's go back." But he only steps harder on the gas. "No," he says, "you've got a train to catch." He sees me craning my neck to stare backward. "Don't worry," he adds, "it'll all still be here next spring." The ~ Edward Abbey

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

It's all still there in heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come. ~ Edward Abbey

Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind. ~ Edward Abbey

Vaughan Telecom installers and contractors ensure the highest quality service for data and network cabling in Toronto and GTA area. ~ Edward Abbey

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing. ~ Edward Abbey

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

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

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 ~ Edward Abbey

What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ, lady, roll that window down! You can't see the desert if you can't smell it. Dusty? Of course it's dusty - this is Utah! But it's good dust, good red Utahn dust, rich in iron, rich in irony. Turn that motor off. Get out of that peice of iron and stretch your varicose veins, take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs! You sir, squinting at the map with your radiator boiling over and your fuel pump vapor-locked, crawl out of that shiny hunk of GM junk and take a walk - yes, leave the old lady and those squawling brats behind for a while, turn your back on them and take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it, it'll do you and her and them a world of good. Give the kids a break too, let them out of the car, let them go scrambling over rocks hunting for rattle ~ Edward Abbey

Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good. Heroes do not want power over others. ~ Edward Abbey

You could, if you wanted to, spend your entire life in a sitting position. When you weren't lying down. ~ Edward Abbey

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony. ~ Edward Abbey

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

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse. ~ Edward Abbey

Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful. ~ Edward Abbey

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither. ~ 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

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

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

Life without music would be an intolerable insult. ~ Edward Abbey

Music is a savage art, a measured madness. ~ Edward Abbey

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. ~ Edward Abbey

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end. ~ Edward Abbey

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be. ~ Edward Abbey

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist. ~ Edward Abbey

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. ~ Edward Abbey

The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness." He sipped at his bourbon and ice. "Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal." Another thought. "And the universe goes mad. ~ Edward Abbey

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

Let's have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence -- for a political and/or economical purpose -- carried out against people and other living things, and is usually conducted by governments against their own citizens (as at Kent State, or in Vietnam, or in Poland, or in most of Latin America right now), or by corporate entities such as J. Paul Getty, Exxon, Mobil Oil, etc etc., against the land and all creatures that depend upon the land for life and livelihood. A bulldozer ripping up a hillside to strip mine for coal is committing terrorism; the damnation of a flowing river followed by the drowning of Cherokee graves, of forest and farmland, is an act of terrorism.
Sabotage, on the other hand, means the use of force against inanimate property, such as machinery, which is being used (e.g.) to deprive human beings of their rightful work (as in the case of Ned Ludd and his mates); sabotage (le sabot dropped in a spinning jenny) -- for whatever purpose -- has never meant and has never implied the use of violence against living creatures. ~ Edward Abbey

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students. ~ Edward Abbey

Only the half-mad are wholly alive. ~ Edward Abbey

A man without a horse is like a man without a weapon: stunted and naked. ~ Edward Abbey

Man was created to complete the horse. ~ Edward Abbey

England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country. ~ Edward Abbey

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself. ~ Edward Abbey

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

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned. ~ Edward Abbey

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. ~ Edward Abbey

Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world ... ~ Edward Abbey

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth. ~ Edward Abbey

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

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

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

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written. ~ Edward Abbey

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. ~ 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

One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever-and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage. ~ Edward Abbey

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

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

Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies. ~ Edward Abbey

High above our heads the owl hoots under the lost moon. A pre-dawn wind comes sifting and sighing through the cottonwood trees; the sound of their dry, papery leaves is like the murmur of distant water, or like the whispering of ghosts in an ancient, empty, condemned cathedral. ~ 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

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. ~ Edward Abbey

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

Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy. ~ Edward Abbey

Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk-walk-WALK upon our sweet and blessed land! ~ Edward Abbey

I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth. ~ Edward Abbey

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

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

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. ~ Edward Abbey

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. ~ Edward Abbey

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

God is love? Not bloody likely. ~ 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

Art, science, philosophy, religion
each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience. ~ Edward Abbey

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? ~ Edward Abbey

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

Wilderness. The word itself is music. ~ Edward Abbey

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true
nobody will ever take you seriously. ~ Edward Abbey

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

The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all. ~ Edward Abbey

The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe. ~ Edward Abbey

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. ~ Edward Abbey

Man is a gregarious creature, we are told, a social being. Does that mean he is also a herd animal? ... Are men no better than sheep or cattle, that they must live always in view of one another in order to feel a sense of safety? I can't believe it! ~ Edward Abbey

No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February. ~ Edward Abbey

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

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. ~ Edward Abbey

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

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others. ~ Edward Abbey

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. ~ Edward Abbey

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak. ~ 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

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough. ~ Edward Abbey

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

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. ~ Edward Abbey

How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah. ~ Edward Abbey

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique. ~ Edward Abbey

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet. ~ Edward Abbey