Edward Abbey Quotes

We are caught,” continued the good doctor, “in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart.

Come on in. The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone — and to no one.

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Life is a bitch, his dark companion said–and then you die. Not so cried Henry! Life is a glorious shining and splendid adventure, and then you die.

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

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

I stand for what I stand on.

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

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.

I might also say, regarding reviews and reviewers, that I have yet to read a review of any of my own books which I could not have written much better myself.

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

All living things on earth are kindred.

My friends and I live in the American SW because we love it, and love it for its own sake - not merely because it's the last region of the forty-eight states to be buried under asphalt and greed.