World Quotes by Edward Abbey

A world without open country would be universal jail.

— Edward Abbey

The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!

— Edward Abbey

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

— Edward Abbey

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

— Edward Abbey

Saving the world was merely a hobby. My *vocation* has been that of inspector of desert water holes.

— Edward Abbey

The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.

— Edward Abbey

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

— Edward Abbey

In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.

— Edward Abbey

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

Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that…

— Edward Abbey

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to…

— Edward Abbey

Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is…

— Edward Abbey

We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.

— Edward Abbey

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come…

— Edward Abbey

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes…

— Edward Abbey

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more…

— Edward Abbey

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

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

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

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion,…

— Edward Abbey

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love…

— Edward Abbey

I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the…

— Edward Abbey

To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard…

— Edward Abbey

most of my wandering in the desert i've done alone. not so much from choice as from necessity - i generally prefer…

— Edward Abbey

Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again,…

— Edward Abbey

“it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way…

— Edward Abbey

There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other…

— Edward Abbey

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

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.

— Edward Abbey

This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.

— Edward Abbey

The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

— Edward Abbey

Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.

— Edward Abbey

If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.

— Edward Abbey

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.

— Edward Abbey

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

— Edward Abbey

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay…

— Edward Abbey

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

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.

— Edward Abbey

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a…

— Edward Abbey

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

— Edward Abbey