Edward Abbey Quotes

Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race.

This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.

A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.

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

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.

Simplicity is always a virtue.

Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.

All governments require enemy governments.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.

The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan.

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.

Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

There are no vacant lots in nature.

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.

I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans.... And rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.

In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.

Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote _The Golden Ass_.

By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

How can I be so evil? It ain't easy.

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.

The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war.

Women who love only women may have a good point.

Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it.

When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.

You can't belay a man who's falling in love.

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

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.

To be alive is to take risks; to be always safe and secure is death.

A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

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.

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

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.

A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.

There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution.

The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

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

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

So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probably be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.

Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

Humility is a virtue when you have no other.