Edward Abbey Quotes

Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.

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

Democracy -- rule by the people -- sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.

it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.

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.

If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dream.

The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.

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

I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.

Our “neoconservatives” are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

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

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

Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature.

I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.

By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

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.

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.

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.

Not all questions can be answered.

Life: another day, another dolor.

I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.

There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

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.

The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.

Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Of course, people with guns kill more people. But that's only natural. It's hard. But it's fair.

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

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.

Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

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

The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.

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

I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.

When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.

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

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

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