Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Not all questions can be answered.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

106. “Life imitates art – but badly.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

119. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

127. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

133. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

144. “Wilderness begins in the human mind.”

— Edward Abbey

145. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

147. “Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.”

— Edward Abbey

148. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

150. “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