American author (1927-1989)
Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Love is a disease. A social disease. A romantic, venereal, medieval disease. A hangover from the days of the fornicating troubadours and the gentlemen in iron britches.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
Grab a woman. Help the movement. Liberate a woman tonight. You'll get stale out here in the woods, living like a bear. Your balls will shrink, your tongue grow stiff and heavy. Your mind will wither away. Whatever became of William Gatlin? Went mad flogging his bloody duff.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.
EDWARD ABBEY
"The Crooked Wood", The Journey Home
The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night", The Journey Home
At that moment I was ready to forsake my other home, forsake my mother and father and little sister and all my friends, and spend the rest of my life in the desert eating cactus for lunch, drinking blood at cocktail time, and letting the ferocious sun flay me skin and soul. I'd gladly have traded parents, school, a college education and a career for one dependable saddle hourse. Later that night, of course, alone in bed, the deadly homesickness would strike me faint.
EDWARD ABBEY
Fire on the Mountain
Beyond the wall of the unreal city ... there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it.
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Of course, people with guns kill more people. But that's only natural. It's hard. But it's fair.
EDWARD ABBEY
Abbey's Road
What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well--about a mile. Two miles.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise