American author (1927-1989)
All governments require enemy governments.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.
EDWARD ABBEY
Down the River
Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitaire
A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitaire
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture--that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitaire
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous -- however roseate -- unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it so richly deserved, while the paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitaire
I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
EDWARD ABBEY
"How It Was", Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitaire
My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.
EDWARD ABBEY
Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitaire
There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.
EDWARD ABBEY
Hayduke Lives
Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power or means to coerce others.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Humility is a virtue when you have no other.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitare
The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Shadows from the Big Woods", The Journey Home
The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Walking", The Journey Home