Edward Abbey Quotes

The automobile, which began as a transportation convenience, has become a bloody tyrant (50,000 lives a year), and it is the responsibility of the park service, as well as that of everyone else concerned with preserving both wilderness and civilization, to begin a campaign of resistance.

The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers' — the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.

The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

If a man's imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.

Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.

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

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

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.

Hayduke smelled something foul in all this. A smoldering bitterness warmed his heart and nerves; the slow fires of anger kept his cockles warm, his hackles rising. Hayduke burned. And he was not a patient man.

Something about a river trip always seems to promote the consumption of potable drugs.

"Life's a dog and then you die? No no. Life is a joyous dance through daffodils beneath cerulean blue skies and then, then what? I forget what happens next."
-A Fool's Progress

Space and scarcity give us dignity. And liberty. And thereby beauty.

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