Edward Abbey Quotes

The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war.

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.

In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.

Paradise is the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God bless America, the Earth upon which we stand.

To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.

Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

The result of this bestial lust is an indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of all of my energies- wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.

When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my checkbook.

The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.

A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.

Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.

What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.

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.

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.

We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!

I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love -- and most of all, an audience!

Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probably be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

Is the Archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.

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

Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.

Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.

The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.

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

Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence.

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

War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.

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.