Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.”

— Edward Abbey

452. “There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author’s self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.”

— Edward Abbey

453. “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

454. “The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.”

— Edward Abbey

455. “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

456. “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

457. “A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

459. “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

460. “Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

462. “There has never been an ‘original’ sin: each is quite banal.”

— Edward Abbey

463. “Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book’s eventual fate.”

— Edward Abbey

464. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

476. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

481. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

486. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— 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. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

495. “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

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

— 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. “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

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. “We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism – a Mongoloid metaphysic.”

— Edward Abbey