Edward Abbey Quotes

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

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

Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables

Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.

A world without open country would be universal jail.

Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.

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

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.

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

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

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

You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.

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

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

A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.

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

Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it.

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

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

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.

It may be true that my desk here is really 'nothing but' a transient eddy of electrons in the flux of universal process. Nevertheless, I find that it continues to support my feet, my revolver, and my cigars all day long. What happens when my back is turned I don't know. Or much care. That's no concern of mine.

May your rivers flow without end... down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs... where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

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

All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.

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

Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.

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.

It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.

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.

The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining.

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

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

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

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.

God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.

Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

A genius is always on duty; even his dreams are tax deductible.

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

The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.

Anarchy works. Italy has proved it for a thousand years.

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.