Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It’s a fool’s life, a rogue’s life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.”

— Edward Abbey

52. “To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.”

— Edward Abbey

53. “As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.”

— Edward Abbey

54. “Simplicity is always a virtue.”

— Edward Abbey

55. “Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?”

— Edward Abbey

56. “Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.”

— Edward Abbey

57. “There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.”

— Edward Abbey

58. “When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country’s river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.”

— Edward Abbey

59. “Art, science, philosophy, religion – each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.”

— Edward Abbey

60. “The industrial corporation is the natural enemy of nature.”

— Edward Abbey

61. “What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.”

— Edward Abbey

62. “I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.”

— Edward Abbey

63. “Beware of the man who has no enemies.”

— Edward Abbey

64. “The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.”

— Edward Abbey

65. “We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.”

— Edward Abbey

66. “Freedom begins between the ears.”

— Edward Abbey

67. “To be alive is to take risks; to be always safe and secure is death.”

— Edward Abbey

68. “The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.”

— Edward Abbey

69. “There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution.”

— Edward Abbey

70. “Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.”

— Edward Abbey

71. “We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.”

— Edward Abbey

72. “Scientific method: There’s a madness in the method.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

74. “Poetry – even bad poetry – may be our final hope.”

— Edward Abbey

75. “Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it’s not the beer cans that are ugly; it’s the highway that is ugly.”

— Edward Abbey

76. “Concrete is heavy; iron is hard – but the grass will prevail.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

78. “Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses...”

— Edward Abbey

79. “Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”

— Edward Abbey

80. “The “terror” of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.”

— Edward Abbey

81. “Life without music would be an intolerable insult.”

— Edward Abbey

82. “Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.”

— Edward Abbey

83. “No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.”

— Edward Abbey

84. “Wilderness. The word itself is music.”

— Edward Abbey

85. “Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”

— Edward Abbey

86. “Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.”

— Edward Abbey

87. “A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.”

— Edward Abbey

88. “Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

— Edward Abbey

89. “Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they’ve wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables.”

— Edward Abbey

90. “The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.”

— Edward Abbey

91. “King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.”

— Edward Abbey

92. “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

93. “Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.”

— Edward Abbey

94. “I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.”

— Edward Abbey

95. “A drink a day keeps the shrink away.”

— Edward Abbey

96. “Henry James was our master of periphrasis – the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.”

— Edward Abbey

97. “I am an enemy of the State. But isn’t everyone?”

— Edward Abbey

98. “The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.”

— Edward Abbey

99. “It is an author’s most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?”

— Edward Abbey

100. “In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.”

— Edward Abbey