Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps, or a hand grenade, if handy,… — 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
If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult . . . I apologize. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave. — 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
As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!' — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully -- as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Let us hope our weapons are never needed - but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when… — 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
At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
