Top 655 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Abbey - Page 2

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.

All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?

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.

Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

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?

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.

And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

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

Without courage, all other virtues are useless.

It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.

How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas.

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.

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

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.

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

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.

The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.

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.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

Why this cult of wilderness?... because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information.

God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.

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

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?

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

If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war; for nationalism; identification with something bigger than the self.

I stand for what I stand on.

Freedom begins between the ears.

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

It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.

Life is already too short to waste on speed.

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.

Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North Star, to serve as a guiding point.

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.

J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty -- you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.

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

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.

So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.

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

The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.

Beware of the man who has no enemies.

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.

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.

I wish to be an inspector of volcanoes. I want to study cloud formations and memorize the wind and learn by heart the habits of the ponderosa pine.