The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill! — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once.… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite? — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers. — 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
What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone and to no one. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North Star, to serve as a guiding… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic. — 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
