Edward Abbey Quotes
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The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t much matter whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.
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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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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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Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.
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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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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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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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What's more American than violence?' Hayduke wanted to know. 'Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.
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Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'
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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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A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
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All living things on earth are kindred.
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Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
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The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
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Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.