Quotes from Edward Abbey

Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.

When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

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

Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.

There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.

Without courage, all other virtues are useless.

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.

The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.

Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?

The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

Why this cult of wilderness?... because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.

Freedom begins between the ears.

Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.

In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.

It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

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.