Top 655 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Abbey

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Edward Abbey.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

Edward Paul Abbey was an American author, essayist, and environmental activist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies. His best-known works include Desert Solitaire, a non-fiction autobiographical account of his time as a park ranger at Arches National Park considered to be an iconic work of nature writing and a staple of early environmentalist writing; the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by environmentalists and groups defending nature by various means, also called eco-warriors; his novel Hayduke Lives!; and his essay collections Down the River (1982) and One Life at a Time, Please (1988).

American - Author | January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

Source: Wikipedia

Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

Edward Abbey

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

Edward Abbey

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.

Edward Abbey

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

Edward Abbey

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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.

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

Grown men do not need leaders.

Edward Abbey

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

Edward Abbey

When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

Edward Abbey

Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

Edward Abbey

There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.

Edward Abbey

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.

Edward Abbey

If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult . . . I apologize.

Edward Abbey

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.

Edward Abbey

The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.

Edward Abbey

An empty man is full of himself.

Edward Abbey

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.

Edward Abbey

Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic....So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

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. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated... To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.

Edward Abbey

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.

Edward Abbey

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.

Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey

May your rivers flow without end... down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs... where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Edward Abbey

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.

Edward Abbey

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.

Edward Abbey

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

Edward Abbey

I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a "surly, illmannered, badtempered fellow." ... Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.

Edward Abbey

Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.

Edward Abbey

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

Edward Abbey

May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.

Edward Abbey

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.

Edward Abbey

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Edward Abbey

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?

Edward Abbey

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

Edward Abbey

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.

Edward Abbey

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.

Edward Abbey

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.

Edward Abbey

A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.

Edward Abbey

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

Edward Abbey

I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars.

Edward Abbey

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.

Edward Abbey

Top 655 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Abbey

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