Quotes from Edward Abbey

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principals of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.

We discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.

Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exhaults and glorifies, the rebel

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

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.

It is not enough to understand the natural world. The point is to defend and preserve it.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.

To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.

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

All living things on earth are kindred.

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.

Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.

All governments require enemy governments.

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

I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.

I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you.

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power or means to coerce others.

There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.

Humility is a virtue when you have no other.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.

The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key.

Love is a disease. A social disease. A romantic, venereal, medieval disease. A hangover from the days of the fornicating troubadours and the gentlemen in iron britches.