Top 655 Quotes & Sayings by Edward Abbey - Page 3

If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.

If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.

There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.

The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.

I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy.

Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.

Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.

I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.

Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.

This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.

Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.

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

Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

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

There never was a good war or a bad revolution.

WEALTH AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT: Let us define the wealthy man as he who has everything he desires. How to reach that happy condition? Two ways

My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.

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.

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.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.

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!

Preacher to me: 'A dollar for the Lord, brother?' Me to preacher: 'That's all right, I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him.'

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

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.

Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.

The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.

A man's duty? To be ready -- with rifle or rood -- to defend his home when the showdown comes.

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.

If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.

It's all still there in heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come.

A world without open country would be universal jail.

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

Not all questions can be answered.

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.

There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.

Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.

When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea.

I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress.

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.

The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.

If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

I am pleased enough with the surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on the rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there? What else do we need?

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.

My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.

Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak.

Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.

Every moment is precious. And precarious.

One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information; (2) coherent knowledge; (3) deep understanding; (4) infinite loving wisdom; (5) no more kidney stones, please.

What is truth? I don't know and I'm sorry I brought it up.

Life is unfair. And it's not fair that life is unfair.

Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.

Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring