Quotes from Edward Abbey

Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.

When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

I am not an atheist but an earthiest.

Oh! For love, for the painfully nourished, tenderly cherished, sweet frenzies illusion, the known-illusion within the globule of sentimental cynicism. For romantic love, then, I sacrifice honor, decensy, human kindness, charity, honesty, friendship and the future -- all, (ah!) for love!

Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death.

Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.

God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.

Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.

Everyone should learn a manual trade. It's never too late to become an honest person.

I try to think of a favorite among my arid-country flowers. But I love them all. How could we be true to one without being false to all the others?

Beyond the wall of the unreal city ... there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it.

When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes -- disease and death and the rotting of flesh.

The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life.

Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

At that moment I was ready to forsake my other home, forsake my mother and father and little sister and all my friends, and spend the rest of my life in the desert eating cactus for lunch, drinking blood at cocktail time, and letting the ferocious sun flay me skin and soul. I'd gladly have traded parents, school, a college education and a career for one dependable saddle hourse. Later that night, of course, alone in bed, the deadly homesickness would strike me faint.

Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Of course, people with guns kill more people. But that's only natural. It's hard. But it's fair.

Let us hope our weapons are never needed -- but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

Money attracts because it gives us the means to command the labor and service and finally the lives of others--human or otherwise.

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely an illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.