Edward Abbey Quotes
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As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.
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There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
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I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. (Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!)
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Freedom begins between the ears.
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To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.
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The plow has probably done more harm - in the long run - than the sword.
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Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.
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What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money.
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Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
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All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
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Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
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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.
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A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
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The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
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Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
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From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
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The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.
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I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.
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I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.
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With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.
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Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'
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Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.
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What's more American than violence?' Hayduke wanted to know. 'Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.
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I am not an atheist but an earthiest.