Quotes by Edward Abbey
(1927 - 1989)

Category	Quote	E-Mail this quote
Abortion	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.
Adventure	Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube -- there are some things one would rather have done than do.
America	If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.
Anarchism	Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
Astrology	Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.
Books	How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.
California	There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
Culture	Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
Death	Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.
Despair	Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry, and other bad habits.
Dogs	When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
Environmental warfare	Always pull up survey stakes anywhere you find them. -- George Washington Hayduke of The Monkey Wrench Gang
Environmentalism	The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.
Fact	There is a kind of poetry in simple fact.
Fiction	This book, though fictional in form, is based strictly on historical fact. Everything in it is real or actually happened. And it all began just one year from today. - (– preface to The Monkey Wrench Gang)
Foibles	It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true -- nobody will take you seriously.
Football	Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are -- retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.
Free love	Free love is priced right.
Fundamentalism	A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically?
Genocide	Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.
Government	In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.
Government	All governments require enemy governments.
Government	Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
Growth	Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Hopeless	When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about. - (The Monkey Wrench Gang)
Hunters	Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and aesthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.
Laws	The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.
Life	We are obliged to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.
Littering	Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.
Logic	If the end does not justify the means -- what can?
Lost	Be sure to let me know if you get lost.
Marriage	Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Mexico	Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.
Music	Life without music would be an intolerable insult.
New York	New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?
Parenthood	Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.
Parklands	National parking lots. - (– re development in the national parks)
Patriotism	A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government. - (naturalist and author)
Perfection	Perfection is a minor virtue.
Pessimism	A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.
Pests	One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers.
Power	Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
Preservation	Keep it like it was. - ("The Monkey Wrench Gang")
Proselyting	The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages -- as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
Reason	Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.
Society	Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
suspicion	Nothing looks more suspicious in the eyes of townsfolk, whether red-skinned or white, than a bearded man on foot with a pack on his back.
teamwork	One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
Time and space	We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning to the phrase to live like men.
War and politics	The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other -- instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Water	There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount -- unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.
Wealth	The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
Wilderness	If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
Wilderness	No wonder the authorities are so anxious to smother wilderness under asphalt and reservoirs. They know what they're doing; their lives depend on it, and all their rotten institutions.
Women	Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.

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