Edward Abbey
Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.Collection: Distance
I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.Collection: Stars
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.Collection: Mean
Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.Collection: Trying
Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.Collection: Dip
Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.Collection: Sacrifice
Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.Collection: Finals
Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.Collection: Mother
When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my checkbook.Collection: Culture
I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.Collection: New York
Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.Collection: Favorite Hobby
One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.Collection: Personality
The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers' -- the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.Collection: Democracy
Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.Collection: Stress
Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are -- retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.Collection: Football
Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.Collection: Home
It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.Collection: Tragedy
Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.Collection: Love
Every moment is precious. And precarious.Collection: Moments
Without courage, all other virtues are useless.Collection: Useless
May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.Collection: Dog
Beware of the man who has no enemies.Collection: Men
In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.Collection: World
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.Collection: Adventure
Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.Collection: Law
Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.Collection: Night
The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.Collection: Nice
The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone - and to no one.Collection: Nature
The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.Collection: Pads
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.Collection: Pro Life
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.Collection: Desert
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.Collection: Inspiring
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.Collection: Animal
Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.Collection: Thinking
Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.Collection: Stress
Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.Collection: Philosophy
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?Collection: New York
Freedom begins between the ears.Collection: Freedom
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.Collection: Book
A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.Collection: Philosophy
When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.Collection: Serious
Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.Collection: Lasts
It may be true that my desk here is really 'nothing but' a transient eddy of electrons in the flux of universal process. Nevertheless, I find that it continues to support my feet, my revolver, and my cigars all day long. What happens when my back is turned I don't know. Or much care. That's no concern of mine.Collection: Feet
Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.Collection: Mother
Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote _The Golden Ass_.Collection: Widows
When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.Collection: Book