Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving.

Edward Abbey
Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

Edward Abbey
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....

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

Edward Abbey
The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

Edward Abbey
Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be — a man.

Edward Abbey
It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.

Edward Abbey
The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for — for what? Someday we'll know.

Edward Abbey
What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

Edward Abbey
I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.

Edward Abbey
Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

Edward Abbey
Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.

Edward Abbey
Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.

Edward Abbey
I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.

Edward Abbey
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

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

Edward Abbey
Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

Edward Abbey
Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.

Edward Abbey
What did Jesus say to the headwaiter at the Last Supper? 'Separate checks, please.'

Edward Abbey
An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.

Edward Abbey
I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.

Edward Abbey
There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Edward Abbey
How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?

Edward Abbey
How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

Edward Abbey
Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.

Edward Abbey
The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!

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

Edward Abbey
Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.

Edward Abbey