Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.”

— Edward Abbey

452. “A man’s duty? To be ready – with rifle or rood – to defend his home when the showdown comes.”

— Edward Abbey

453. “One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.”

— Edward Abbey

454. “The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.”

— Edward Abbey

455. “A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist.”

— Edward Abbey

456. “Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.”

— Edward Abbey

457. “When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I’ll never have time to regret it.”

— Edward Abbey

458. “I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?”

— Edward Abbey

459. “Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles...”

— Edward Abbey

460. “If the world is irrational, we can never know it – either it or its irrationality.”

— Edward Abbey

461. “I’ve wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets – the seventeen who got away.”

— Edward Abbey

462. “What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?”

— Edward Abbey

463. “Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where’s our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you’ll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady’s foot.”

— Edward Abbey

464. “Though I’ve lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.”

— Edward Abbey

465. “All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?”

— Edward Abbey

466. “England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.”

— Edward Abbey

467. “I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.”

— Edward Abbey

468. “Generally speaking, it’s a matter of only mild intellectual interest to me whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth. In fact, I don’t care a rat’s ass either way.”

— Edward Abbey

469. “The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”

— Edward Abbey

470. “Music is a savage art, a measured madness.”

— Edward Abbey

471. “All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying – a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.”

— Edward Abbey

472. “By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.”

— Edward Abbey

473. “Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.”

— Edward Abbey

474. “Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so.”

— Edward Abbey

475. “Life is cruel? Compared to what?”

— Edward Abbey

476. “If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there’s hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler’s Germany and Rebecca’s Sunnybrook Farm.”

— Edward Abbey

477. “I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.”

— Edward Abbey

478. “Preacher to me: ‘A dollar for the Lord, brother?’ Me to preacher: ‘That’s all right, I’m headed his way. I’ll give it to him when I see him.’”

— Edward Abbey

479. “I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.”

— Edward Abbey

480. “Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.”

— Edward Abbey

481. “In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.”

— Edward Abbey

482. “My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.”

— Edward Abbey

483. “It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don’t find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.”

— Edward Abbey

484. “Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

486. “The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.”

— Edward Abbey

487. “We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races – by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.”

— Edward Abbey

488. “Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.”

— Edward Abbey

489. “Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.”

— Edward Abbey

490. “A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.”

— Edward Abbey

491. “Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely; at least I hope so.”

— Edward Abbey

492. “How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you’ve lived.”

— Edward Abbey

493. “Is the Archbishop’s blessing any more meaningful than the Politician’s handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.”

— Edward Abbey

494. “Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you’ve nothing better to do.”

— Edward Abbey

495. “How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.”

— Edward Abbey

496. “Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.”

— Edward Abbey

497. “Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold.”

— Edward Abbey

498. “The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.”

— Edward Abbey

499. “The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog’s gonna root up an acorn once in a while.”

— Edward Abbey

500. “God is love? Not bloody likely.”

— Edward Abbey