Edward Abbey Quotes
A house built on greed cannot long endure.
The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North Star, to serve as a guiding point.
Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
Every important change in our society, for the good, at least, has taken place because of popular pressure-pressure from below, from the great mass of people.
Cold morning on Aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, build fire in old stove. Second, start coffee. Then, heat up last night's pork chops and spinach for breakfast. Why not? And why the hell not?
Why this cult of wilderness?... because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?
The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.
I wish to be an inspector of volcanoes. I want to study cloud formations and memorize the wind and learn by heart the habits of the ponderosa pine.
The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.
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.
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.
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!
And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.
J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty -- you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.
Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.
Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.
Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.
If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.
