Quotes from Edward Abbey

WEALTH AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT: Let us define the wealthy man as he who has everything he desires. How to reach that happy condition? Two ways

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.

Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.

Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word 'rebellion'; the word 'revolt'; the word 'revolution'.

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.

You can't belay a man who's falling in love.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

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.

A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.

No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.

Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.

Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.

Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)

Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.

Man was created to complete the horse.

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.