Quotes from Edward Abbey

We like the taste of freedom ... because we like the smell of danger.

We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.

A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.

I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well--about a mile. Two miles.

Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.

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

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.

The desert rat carries one distinction like a halo: he has learned to love the kind of country that most people find unlovable.

The most attractive feature of Alaska, I say, is its small, insignificant human population.

There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.

All gold is fool's gold.

Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am -- a reluctant enthusiast ... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.

The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.

Civilization is the wild river; culture, 592,000 tons of cement; civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates.

Cynicism is a cheap emotion, a craven substitute for thought and action.

Edinburgh. A soft gray loveliness, fog-shrouded, gray-green, gray-blue, gray-gray, mauve, melting, misting over, grave.

If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone?

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.