Edward Abbey Quotes
-
'A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
-
The plow has probably done more harm - in the long run - than the sword.
-
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!)
-
A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
-
Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.
-
With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.
-
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.
-
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
-
One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever - and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage.
-
In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
-
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
-
What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money.
-
Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.
-
From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
-
The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.
-
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may not ever need to go there.
-
Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
-
I am not an atheist but an earthiest.