Quotes from Edward Abbey

One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.

I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy.

May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill.

The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone -- and to no one.

The very poor are materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.

A city man is at home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike.

Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.

I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause.

Culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life.

Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history.

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.

When life is cheap death is rich.

If I were a millionaire--well, a multimillionaire--I'd buy me an old ferryboat like the Eureka, make a floating home of it. What a grand ballroom, what a place for parties. And when I tired of the social hubbub, I'd weigh anchor and steam away to some romantic hideaway like Richmond, Oakland, or South San Francisco. East San Mateo too might be worth investigating.

You can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamn contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe.

Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.

Most of my wandering in the desert I've done alone. Not so much from choice as from necessity—I generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government ' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.

There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.