Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

Edward Abbey
We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees.

Edward Abbey
The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

Edward Abbey
In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.

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

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

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

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

Edward Abbey
A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.

Edward Abbey
I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not
realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.

Edward Abbey
A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.

Edward Abbey
You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.

Edward Abbey
In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.

Edward Abbey
Cold morning on Aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, build fire in old stove. Second, start coffee. Then, heat up last night's pork chops and spinach for breakfast. Why not? And why the hell not?

Edward Abbey
Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.

Edward Abbey
One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.

Edward Abbey
In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.

Edward Abbey
Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

Edward Abbey
The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners — and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.

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

Edward Abbey
Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.

Edward Abbey
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.

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

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

Edward Abbey
The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.

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

Edward Abbey
I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life — if I live that long.

Edward Abbey