Edward Abbey Quotes
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourist can in a hundred miles.
To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.
If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws will know wilderness.
The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need.
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes, and all that canoes is part of him.
The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.
The sun, especially at this time, comes up like thunder.
Be as I am-a reluctant enthusiast…a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.
There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast … a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic…
Civilization is a conspiracy to keep you tame.
I am not an atheist but an earthiest.
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bonafide stupidity, there ain’t nothin’ can beat teamwork.
The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante’s paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.
The blizzard raged seventy-two hours, with no breaks, no calm, no breath between the old gusts and the new, and the snow, moving fast, halfweight with ice, when the skies cleared, smothered the western end of the Two Medicine Plateau under a hundred feet of cottony white.
Thou shalt not ration fuel by political boundaries; neither shall thy vehicle be a respecter of persons.
A Boy Scout troop consists of twelve little kids in shorts and twelve grown-up kids in long pants, and the shorts have a tendency to become long pants before anyone is really aware of what has happened to them.
Is it possible to be too much alive?
Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.
An anarchist is anyone who doesn’t need a cop to tell him what to do.
Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
What a fool I am to come to this godforsaken country in the first place!
A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.
Gentlemen, the only way to prevent a revolution, is to pardon rebels and fire all politicians.
I must confess, I was born at a very early age.
Freedom begins between the ears.
Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around in America…and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class – whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.
Wolves are the most underrepresented of any animal in literature – so well represented in magazines and advertising.
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship.
Our ‘neoconservatives’ are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as hell.
The so-called Left conducts itself in a way that is, for practical purposes, idiotic. It is in the business of alienating potential natural allies, driving away sympathizers. That’s no way to influence public policy.
A sensitive poet too slow to marry may fall victim to a couple of dental floss tycoons.
Some patriots plan and prepare for a glorious return to the gold standard or a South victory in the War Against Northern Aggression. Or if they prefer, a virgin birth, fourteen five-dollar gold coins in every pot, and free season’s tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet…I take small solace from such lunatic enterprises. Emma Goldman caught the kernel of my distaste for politics when she wrote, ‘There’s something so absurd about it all – the humbuggery, the insignificance of the players, the petty tyranny, the tomfoolery, the epic idiocy of the audiences…’
You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
Election time is a lot like Halloween. Both involve costumes, tricks, and people constantly clamoring for treats.
The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.
The world is filled with conflict. Because adults lead unresolved, incomplete lives. Because our families harbor secrets. Because we acquiesce to injustice and aggression. Because we feast on illusions.
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even, or especially, if we never go there.