Quotes by Edward Abbey

Wilderness begins in the human mind.

Wilderness complements and completes civilization. I might say that the existence of wilderness is also a compliment to civilization. Any society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name of civilization.

The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.

Love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach. It is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need if only we had the eyes to see.

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

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.

New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard, but the grass will prevail.

When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist.

Society is a like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

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

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 just realized some things make me happier, and the good weather in California makes me happier.

All gold is fool's gold.

This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief -- like a whisper of wind -- when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word reality in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you.

Humility is a virtue when you have no other.

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture -- that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.

All governments require enemy governments.

The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause.

I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill.

Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history.

Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.

Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death.

Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.

Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.

A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

Civilization is the wild river; culture, 592,000 tons of cement; civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates.

There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy.

A city man is at home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike.

Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

When life is cheap death is rich.

I am not an atheist but an earthiest.

The most attractive feature of Alaska, I say, is its small, insignificant human population.

Oh! For love, for the painfully nourished, tenderly cherished, sweet frenzies illusion, the known-illusion within the globule of sentimental cynicism. For romantic love, then, I sacrifice honor, decensy, human kindness, charity, honesty, friendship and the future -- all, (ah!) for love!

I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well -- about a mile. Two miles.

Contempt for animal life leads to contempt for human life.

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.

To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.

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

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

Money attracts because it gives us the means to command the labor and service and finally the lives of others -- human or otherwise.

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

There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life.

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

Beyond the wall of the unreal city ... there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it.

The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely an illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.

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

Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

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.

I try to think of a favorite among my arid-country flowers. But I love them all. How could we be true to one without being false to all the others?

Love is a disease. A social disease. A romantic, venereal, medieval disease. A hangover from the days of the fornicating troubadours and the gentlemen in iron britches.

The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.

Cynicism is a cheap emotion, a craven substitute for thought and action.

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

We like the taste of freedom ... because we like the smell of danger.

Walking is the only form of transportation in which a man proceeds erect -- like a man -- on his own legs, under his own power. There is immense satisfaction in that.

The desert rat carries one distinction like a halo: he has learned to love the kind of country that most people find unlovable.

The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other -- instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

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.

But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

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

Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive and the limp.

We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.

God is love? Not bloody likely.

What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?

Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

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

Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.

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

How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?

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

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?).

There was this tendency to drift. And yet  when she thought about it, what did she really want to do? Or be? She had given up dancing-the dance-because it was too demanding, because it required an almost total devotion which she was unwilling to give. The cruelest art.

Books are like eggs -- best when fresh.

Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.

I am -- really am -- an extremist, one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

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

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay.

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

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

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

And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

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.

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.