Quotes from Edward Abbey

It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.

Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.

I'm tired of doing what I don't want to do to live the way I don't want to live.

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.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.

Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.

If the end does not justify the means - what can?

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

There never was a good war or a bad revolution.

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.

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

War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.

War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.

Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.

In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.