Edward Abbey Quotes

Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.

Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.

Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race.

Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection.But it's all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing on the mind.

Science transcends mere politics. As recent history demonstrates, scientists are as willing to work for a Tojo, a Hitler, or a Stalin as for the free nations of the West.

Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.

Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.

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.

Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.

Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.

There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.

If the end does not justify the means - what can?

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

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

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

Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.

A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn sight better.

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.

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.

When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.

I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.

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

In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.

Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.

In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.

Life imitates art -- but badly.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

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.

Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea.

If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.

The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone - and to no one.

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.

It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.

A pretty girl can do no wrong.

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)