Edward Abbey
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.Collection: Alone
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.Collection: Patriotism
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.Collection: Science
The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.Collection: War
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.Collection: Amazing
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.Collection: Men
Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.Collection: Anger
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.Collection: Funny
Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.Collection: Power
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!Collection: Nature
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.Collection: Imagination
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.Collection: Nature
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
Grown men do not need leaders.
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.
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.
Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
If the end does not justify the means - what can?
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.
Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.
To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.Collection: Stupid
The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.Collection: Inspirational
The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.Collection: Inspirational
Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?Collection: Rivers
The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.Collection: Hate
If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.Collection: Dream
May your rivers flow without end... 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 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.Collection: Beautiful
In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.Collection: Rocks
Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic....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.Collection: Running
There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.Collection: Stupidity
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... To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.Collection: Distance
I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.Collection: Atheist
I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.Collection: Tired
Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.Collection: Enemy
An empty man is full of himself.Collection: Men
Only the half-mad are wholly alive.Collection: Mad
If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult . . . I apologize.Collection: Apologizing
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.Collection: People
There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.Collection: Beauty Everywhere
The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information.Collection: Horse
Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.Collection: Men
The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.Collection: Vocabulary