Famous Edward Abbey Quotations

First 1 Last 
"The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals."
by Edward Abbey
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
by Edward Abbey
"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets."
by Edward Abbey
"One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork."
by Edward Abbey
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
by Edward Abbey
"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."
by Edward Abbey
"A drink a day keeps the shrink away."
by 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"
by Edward Abbey
"Beware the writer who always encloses the word reality in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you"
by Edward Abbey
"Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion."
by Edward Abbey
"Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers-- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls."
by Edward Abbey
"If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government --and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws."
by 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."
by Edward Abbey
"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets."
by Edward Abbey
"That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding."
by Edward Abbey
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders."
by Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)
"The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative."
by Edward Abbey (Vox Clamans in Deserto)
"Mildly talented in a variety of ways but with no genuine ability in any one field, she was like me, the perennial hapless self-amused dilettante, half-worried by the slippage of time but determined to enjoy failure anyway."
by Edward Abbey
"Most of the public lands in the West, and especially the Southwest, are what you might call cow burnt. Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of [cows].... They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestems and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds. Even when the cattle are not physically present, you see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. If you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle."
by Edward Abbey
"Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination."
by Edward Abbey
"It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order. But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home; to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own culture. If the writer is unwilling to fill this part, then the writer should abandon pretense and find another line of work: become a shoe repairman, a brain surgeon, a janitor, a cowboy, a nuclear physicist, a bus driver."
by Edward Abbey
"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."
by Edward Abbey
"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."
by Edward Abbey
"Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so."
by Edward Abbey
"Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses...."
by Edward Abbey
"I have enough money in the bank now to buy enough beans and rice for twenty-five years. To the end (sometimes longed for). Why not kidnap Suzy and sneak off to the life of a semi-hermit? A tempting, constantly tempting idea. ...... Peace. Simplicity. Order, ceremony and ritual. Voluntary poverty. An end to clutter and this vulgar, stifling, crushing burden of things"
by Edward Abbey
"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."
by Edward Abbey
"We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism."
by Edward Abbey
"That's the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn't matter much whether you get where you're going or not. You'll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home."
by Edward Abbey
"Why wilderness? Because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger."
by Edward Abbey
"We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.... We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope."
by Edward Abbey


Hire a Writer