Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.

Edward Abbey
Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
The plow has probably done more harm — in the long run — than the sword.

Edward Abbey
In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

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

Edward Abbey
If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully — as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.

Edward Abbey
Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so.

Edward Abbey
Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

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 comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.

Edward Abbey
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.

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

Edward Abbey
Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.

Edward Abbey
All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.

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

Edward Abbey
Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.

Edward Abbey
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.

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

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy.... Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.

Edward Abbey
Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

Edward Abbey
I always write with my.357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.

Edward Abbey
'There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.'

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

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

Edward Abbey
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

Edward Abbey
Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

Edward Abbey