Quotes from Edward Abbey

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.

There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.

I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.

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.

When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good. Heroes do not want power over others.

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.

Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.

My most memorable hikes can be classified as 'Shortcuts that Backfired'.

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers' -- the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.

A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

Grown men do not need leaders.

But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.