Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

Edward Abbey
To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?

Edward Abbey
Our world is so full of beautiful things: fruit and ideas and women and good men and banjo music and onions with purple skins. A virtual Paradise. But even Paradise can be damned, flooded, overrun, generally mucked up by fools in pursuit of paper profits and plastic happiness.

Edward Abbey
In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.

Edward Abbey
We would guard and defend and save it [wilderness] as a place for all who wish to discover the nearly lost pleasures of adventure, adventure not only in the physical sense, but also mental, spiritual, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual adventure. A place for the free.

Edward Abbey
Yes. Feet on earth. Knock on wood. Touch stone. Good luck to all.

Edward Abbey
Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps, or a hand grenade, if handy, or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a.44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface.

Edward Abbey
The national parks belong to everyone. To the people. To all of us. The government keeps saying so and maybe, in this one case at least, the government is telling the truth. Hard to believe, but possible.

Edward Abbey
Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and rd3 -world black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.

Edward Abbey
It is my fear that if we allow the freedom of the hills, and the last of the wilderness to be taken from us, then the very idea of freedom may die with it.

Edward Abbey
Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables

Edward Abbey
The itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.

Edward Abbey
There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.

Edward Abbey
Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist.

Edward Abbey
[After supper] I put on hat and coat and go outside again, sit on the table, and watch the sky and the desert dissolve slowly into mystery under the chemistry of twilight.

Edward Abbey
There is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is progress.

Edward Abbey
One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.

Edward Abbey
In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)

Edward Abbey
Not only the pretty birds, but also the predators and reptiles, the ugly and unloved, the organic and inorganic — all belong here, with us, on the same small planet.

Edward Abbey
Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.

Edward Abbey
To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

Edward Abbey
I am — really am — an extremist, one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another. That's the way I like it.

Edward Abbey
Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history.

Edward Abbey
Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.

Edward Abbey
It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.

Edward Abbey
The philosophers and the theologians have agreed, for three thousand years, that the perfect is immutable — that which cannot alter and cannot ever be altered. They were wrong. We were wrong. Glen Canyon was destroyed. Everything changes, and nothing is more vulnerable than the beautiful.

Edward Abbey
To the east, under the spreading sunrise, are more mesas, more canyons, league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado — a sea of desert.

Edward Abbey