Edward Abbey Quotes

Life: another day, another dolor.

The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.

Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it.

Capitalism sounds good in theory but it just doesn't work.

I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.

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.

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

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

Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.

Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.

A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.

A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.

Man was created to complete the horse.

The dog's life is a good life, for a dog.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

In history-as-politics, the 'future' is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen.

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.

The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.

In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.

Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace -- a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.

When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

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

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

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.

As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.

Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.

The gross evil of our time defies all labels.

Hard times are a-coming, and people without useful, practical skills are going to suffer. Or suffer most.

How become a writer? Naturally.

Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true--nobody will ever take you seriously.

As to the charge that I am a cranky old man, I plead guilty.

We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase 'to live like men.

There is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.