Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the
basic tyrant of the modern age.

Edward Abbey
I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.

Edward Abbey
The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.

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

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

Edward Abbey
The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.

Edward Abbey
Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

Edward Abbey
With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.

Edward Abbey
The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.

Edward Abbey
The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence.

Edward Abbey
It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

Edward Abbey
Most of my wandering in the desert I've done alone. Not so much from choice as from necessity—I generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go.

Edward Abbey
Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.

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

Edward Abbey
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.

Edward Abbey
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.

Edward Abbey
Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.

Edward Abbey
Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.

Edward Abbey
There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.

Edward Abbey
The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

Edward Abbey
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.

Edward Abbey
It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.

Edward Abbey
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati — those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.

Edward Abbey
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

Edward Abbey
If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

Edward Abbey
I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay.

Edward Abbey
God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.

Edward Abbey
I would expand the Biblical aphorism... in this fashion: the root of all evil is the love of power. And power attracts the worst and corrupts the best among men.

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