Edward Abbey Quotes
The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.
Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.
Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.
Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.
I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe.
What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?
Truth is merely common sense, say the naive realist. Really? Then where, precisely, is the location of--a rainbow? In the air? In the eye? In between? Or somewhere else?
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.
A man's duty? To be ready -- with rifle or rood -- to defend his home when the showdown comes.
Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.
My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.
It's all still there in heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come.
The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.
Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.
The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.
Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
Our “neoconservatives” are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.
I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.
Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.
Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.
We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.
Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.
