Edward Abbey Quotes

477 Sourced Quotes

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

Edward Abbey
I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.

Edward Abbey
Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.

Edward Abbey
The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North
Star, to serve as a guiding point.

Edward Abbey
Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.

Edward Abbey
In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.

Edward Abbey
Concrete is heavy; iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.

Edward Abbey
Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.

Edward Abbey
The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.

Edward Abbey
Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.

Edward Abbey
Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world....

Edward Abbey
A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.

Edward Abbey
When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.

Edward Abbey
From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

Edward Abbey
In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

Edward Abbey
In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.

Edward Abbey
King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.

Edward Abbey
Saving the world was merely a hobby. My *vocation* has been that of
inspector of desert water holes.

Edward Abbey
Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats.

Edward Abbey
As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.

Edward Abbey
There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation. It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino.

Edward Abbey
According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum." I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces.

Edward Abbey
Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.

Edward Abbey
The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

Edward Abbey
In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

Edward Abbey
Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

Edward Abbey
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.

Edward Abbey
Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

Edward Abbey
The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Edward Abbey
When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes — disease and death and the rotting of flesh.

Edward Abbey