Edward Abbey Quotes
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Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.
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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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With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.
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We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
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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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'There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.'
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In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
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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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When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
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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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Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
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Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.
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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 biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
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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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Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.
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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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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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The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
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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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My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving.
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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.