Edward Abbey Quotes (146 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Down the River (1982)
Context: 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.

Edward Abbey: Trending quotes

“Come on in. The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone — and to no one.”

Edward Abbey

“Come On In”, p. 88
The Journey Home (1977)

“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

Edward Abbey

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”

Edward Abbey

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

Edward Abbey Quotes

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”

Edward Abbey

“The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy.”

Edward Abbey

Abbey's Road (1979)
Context: The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

“To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.”

Edward Abbey

"Walking", p. 205
The Journey Home (1977)
Context: There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me. <!-- π

“I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

Edward Abbey

Quoted in Saving Nature's Legacy : Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (1994) by Reed F. Noss, Allen Y. Cooperrider, and Rodger Schlickeisen, p. 338
Context: One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

“Civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates, like tired, sick, stifled blood.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

"Episodes and Visions", p. 308
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori; Civilization is Sartre; culture Cocteau; Civilization is mutual aid and self-defense; culture is the judge, the lawbook and the forces of Law & Ordure (sic); Civilization is uprising, insurrection, revolution; culture is the war of state against state, or of machines against people, as in Hungary and Vietnam; Civilization is tolerance, detachment and humor, or passion, anger, revenge; culture is the entrance examination, the gas chamber, the doctoral dissertation and the electric chair; Civilization is the Ukrainian peasant Nestor Makhno fighting the Germans, then the Reds, then the Whites, then the Reds again; culture is Stalin and the Fatherland; Civilization is Jesus turning water into wine; culture is Christ walking on the waves; Civilization is a youth with a Molotov cocktail in his hand; culture is the Soviet tank or the L. A. cop that guns him down; Civilization is the wild river; culture, 592,000 tons of cement; Civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates, like tired, sick, stifled blood.

“The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key.”

Edward Abbey

“Walking” p. 205
The Journey Home (1977)
Context: 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.

“Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.”

Edward Abbey

“Civilization is mutual aid and self-defense; culture is the judge, the lawbook and the forces of Law & Ordure”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

“The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.”

Edward Abbey

"A Walk in the Desert Hills", page 44
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (1984)
Context: 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.

“The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.”

Edward Abbey

“Shadows from the Big Woods”, p. 225
The Journey Home (1977)
Context: The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

“His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.”

Edward Abbey

Source: The Journey Home (1977), p. 121
Context: As for the "solitary confinement of the mind," my theory is that solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses (bad for brains) and conversation-clogged seminars. To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.

“This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

"The First Morning", p. 1
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

“Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.”

Edward Abbey

Context: The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

Abbey's Road (1979)

“I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
"Cliffrose and Bayonets", p. 25
Desert Solitaire (1968)

“The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death.”

Edward Abbey

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 11 : Money Et Cetera, p. 100
Context: 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.

“It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.”

Edward Abbey

“Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

“Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”

Edward Abbey

“Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.”

Edward Abbey

"Water", p. 114
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Source: The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Source: Desert Solitaire

“You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”

Edward Abbey

Source: The Best of Edward Abbey

“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”

Edward Abbey

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

Edward Abbey

Misattributed

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”

Edward Abbey

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a Juniper tree or the wings of a vulture-that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
Source: Desert Solitaire

“Freedom begins between the ears.”

Edward Abbey

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

“The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”

Edward Abbey

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Preface (dated June 1987) for 1988 reprint of Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

“I am not an atheist but an earthiest.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

"Down the River", p. 163
Desert Solitaire (1968)

“If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”

Edward Abbey

“Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.”

Edward Abbey

“Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.”

Edward Abbey

“Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.”

Edward Abbey

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.”

Edward Abbey

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.”

Edward Abbey

"Shadows from the Big Woods", p. 223
The Journey Home (1977)

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”

Edward Abbey

“A drink a day keeps the shrink away.”

Edward Abbey

“I stand for what I stand on.”

Edward Abbey

“There's beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.”

Edward Abbey

"The Ancient Dust", page 153
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (1984)

“An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Source: Desert Solitaire

“Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”

Edward Abbey book The Monkey Wrench Gang

Source: The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

“Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”

Edward Abbey

“Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Source: Desert Solitaire

“A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.”

Edward Abbey

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.”

Edward Abbey

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”

Edward Abbey book The Monkey Wrench Gang

page 294
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
Variant: He recalled Dr. Sarvis' favorite apothegm: When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
Source: The Monkey Wrench Gang

“When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.”

Edward Abbey

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.”

Edward Abbey

“Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”

Edward Abbey

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.”

Edward Abbey

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)