Edward Abbey

“Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.”

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.”

“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.”

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

“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.”

“We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.”

“Enjoy our great American West -- climb those mountains, run those rivers, hike those canyons, explore those forests, and share in the bounty of wilderness, friendship, love, and the common effort to save what we love. Do this and we will be strong, and bold, and happy, we will outlive our enemies, we will live to piss on their graves.”

“My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”

“I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.”

“We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase 'to live like men.”

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

“All living things on earth are kindred.”

“I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. (Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!)”

“Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

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

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

“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.”

“Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.”

“We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may not ever need to go there.”

“But the 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. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us — if only we were worthy of it.”

“When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes — disease and death and the rotting of flesh.”

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”

“I am not an atheist but an earthiest.”

“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.”

“Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.”

““Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.””

“Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.”

“What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.”

“My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving.”

“He recalled Dr. Sarvis' favorite apothegm: When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”

““What do we know? What do we really know? He licks his dried cracked lips. We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.””

“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.”

“All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.”

“Come on in. The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone — and to no one.”

“The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.”

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

“One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever — and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage.”

“The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t much matter whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.”

“Knowing now what we have learned, unless the need were urgent, I could no more sink the blade of an ax into the tissues of a living tree than I could drive it into the flesh of a fellow human.”

“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.”

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.”

“The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.”

“Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.”

“[Concerning river runners:] If we were going into war again I can't think of any I'd rather have on our side. I mean, all of these good men and women. And if they were on the other side I'd join the other side.”

“Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.”

“I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.”

“One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.”

“If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world implies contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.”

“I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.”

“There's beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.”

“I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. 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.”

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

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

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.”

“One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.”

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

“The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.”

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

“There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.”

“Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.”

“Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for "To hell with our children."”

“The plow has probably done more harm —\xa0in the long run —\xa0than the sword.”

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

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”

“From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.”

“Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.”

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

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

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”

“The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.”

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

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“Freedom begins between the ears.”

“The "Terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.”

“Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.”

“What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money.”

“When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”

“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

“An empty man is full of himself.”

“I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.”

“If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.”

“The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.”

“God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.”

“Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers — obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.”

“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.”

“Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.”

“Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.”

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”

“Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.”

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

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”