Edward Abbey Quotes
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I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
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'A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.'
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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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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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One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
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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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There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
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The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
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A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
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Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
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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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What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money.
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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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From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
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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.
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Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
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The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.
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Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.
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In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
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All living things on earth are kindred.
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The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
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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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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.
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Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.