Edward Abbey Quotes

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

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.

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationist.

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.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.

Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.

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.'

Let us hope our weapons are never needed - but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.

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

Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.

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

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

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

The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.

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

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

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

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

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.

Women who love only women may have a good point.

Life is cruel? Compared to what?

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

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.

Wilderness begins in the human mind.

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

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.

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.

Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.

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

Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.

Spartacus, like Jesus, was also crucified by the Romans. And for equally good reasons.

I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.

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

In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)