Edward Abbey

Homosexuality like androgyny might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation crowding and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.

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

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.

There is science logic reason there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

The reason we need wilderness is because we are really wild animals. Every man needs a place he can go, to go crazy in peace. Only then can we return to man's other life, to the other way, to the order and sanity and beauty of what will somewhere be, unless all visions are false, the human community.

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.

In all of nature there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

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

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront

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.

Somewhere in the depths of soltitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

Grown men do not need leaders.

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

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

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

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist.

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

Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline the first often tasting like the second.

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

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

Wilderness complements and completes civilization. I might say that the existence of wilderness is also a compliment to civilization. Any society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name of civilization.

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

Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

Concrete is heavy iron is hard but the grass will prevail.

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be will be a human zoo. A high tech slum.

Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.

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.

The more fantastic an ideology or theology the more fanatic its adherents.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube there are some things one would rather have done than do.

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

The terror of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.

A crude meal no doubt but the best of all sauces is hunger.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

There is this to be said for walking: it's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.

All living things on earth are kindred.

If the end does not justify the means - what can?

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

You cant study the darkness by flooding it with light.

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.

Wilderness begins in the human mind.

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

New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?

Love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach. It is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need if only we had the eyes to see.

Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

When the situation is desperate it is too late to be serious. Be playful.

Freedom begins between the ears.

The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.

Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars.