Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.”

— Edward Abbey

102. “Life imitates art – but badly.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

113. “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

114. “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

115. “Every moment is precious. And precarious.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

118. “Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

120. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

122. “Without courage, all other virtues are useless.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

125. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

128. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

130. “Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.”

— Edward Abbey

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

137. “Wilderness begins in the human mind.”

— Edward Abbey

138. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

140. “A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be – will be – a human zoo. A high-tech slum.”

— Edward Abbey

141. “Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow.”

— Edward Abbey

142. “When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government – and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.”

— Edward Abbey

143. “You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.”

— Edward Abbey

144. “So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.”

— Edward Abbey

145. “A life without tragedy would not be worth living.”

— Edward Abbey

146. “We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.”

— Edward Abbey

147. “Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.”

— Edward Abbey

148. “A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.”

— Edward Abbey

149. “Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it.”

— Edward Abbey

150. “Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?”

— Edward Abbey