Saving the world was merely a hobby. My *vocation* has been that of inspector of desert water holes. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill! — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
most of my wandering in the desert i've done alone. not so much from choice as from necessity - i generally prefer… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
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… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
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… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century. — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down. — Edward Abbey Copy Share
All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.” — Edward Abbey Copy Share
