Edward Abbey Quotes
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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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All living things on earth are kindred.
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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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In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
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We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
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Concerning river runners: If we were going into war again I can't think of any I'd rather have on our side. I mean, all of these good men and women. And if they were on the other side I'd join the other side.
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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.
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'There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.'
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I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.
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Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.
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When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
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Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.
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Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
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Knowing now what we have learned, unless the need were urgent, I could no more sink the blade of an ax into the tissues of a living tree than I could drive it into the flesh of a fellow human.
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When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
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The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.
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Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.
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If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world implies contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.
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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.
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He recalled Dr. Sarvis' favorite apothegm: When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
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No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
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I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
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The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
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'Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.'