Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.”

— Edward Abbey

102. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

105. “The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe.”

— Edward Abbey

106. “Paradise is the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God bless America, the Earth upon which we stand.”

— Edward Abbey

107. “Not all questions can be answered.”

— Edward Abbey

108. “Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.”

— Edward Abbey

109. “Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.”

— Edward Abbey

110. “Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.”

— Edward Abbey

111. “Life imitates art – but badly.”

— Edward Abbey

112. “Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much more.”

— Edward Abbey

113. “The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe – fear and awe of the State.”

— Edward Abbey

114. “If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.”

— Edward Abbey

115. “When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town’s in trouble.”

— Edward Abbey

116. “Our ‘neoconservatives’ are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.”

— Edward Abbey

117. “I know my own nation best. That’s why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I’m a patriot. A dangerous man.”

— Edward Abbey

118. “New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?”

— Edward Abbey

119. “One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.”

— Edward Abbey

120. “A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.”

— Edward Abbey

121. “I thought I was wrong once,” Seldom said, “but I found out later I was mistaken.”

— Edward Abbey

122. “To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.”

— Edward Abbey

123. “A man without a horse is like a man without a weapon: stunted and naked.”

— Edward Abbey

124. “Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.”

— Edward Abbey

125. “What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

— Edward Abbey

126. “The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.”

— Edward Abbey

127. “I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.”

— Edward Abbey

128. “Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.”

— Edward Abbey

129. “All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.”

— Edward Abbey

130. “Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama’s lap from alcohol and infantilism.”

— Edward Abbey

131. “Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game.”

— Edward Abbey

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132. “It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.”

— Edward Abbey

133. “I’m a humanist; I’d rather kill a man than a snake.”

— Edward Abbey

134. “In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.”

— Edward Abbey

135. “Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.”

— Edward Abbey

136. “The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North Star, to serve as a guiding point.”

— Edward Abbey

137. “God is a sound people make when they’re too tired to think anymore.”

— Edward Abbey

138. “Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.”

— Edward Abbey

139. “In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.”

— Edward Abbey

140. “There’s nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.”

— Edward Abbey

141. “What’s the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.”

— Edward Abbey

142. “The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.”

— Edward Abbey

143. “No man is wise enough to be another man’s master. Each man’s as good as the next – if not a damn sight better.”

— Edward Abbey

144. “I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.”

— Edward Abbey

145. “Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.”

— Edward Abbey

146. “In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.”

— Edward Abbey

147. “In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.”

— Edward Abbey

148. “Wilderness begins in the human mind.”

— Edward Abbey

149. “The hawk’s cry is as sharp as its beak.”

— Edward Abbey

150. “How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.”

— Edward Abbey