Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

153. “Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.”

— Edward Abbey

154. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

157. “In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.”

— Edward Abbey

158. “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

159. “We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

161. “All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.”

— Edward Abbey

162. “Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.”

— Edward Abbey

163. “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

164. “Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world...”

— Edward Abbey

165. “America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.”

— Edward Abbey

166. “Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.”

— Edward Abbey

167. “There are no vacant lots in nature.”

— Edward Abbey

168. “Jesus don’t walk on water no more; his feet leak.”

— Edward Abbey

169. “Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.”

— Edward Abbey

170. “Capitalism sounds good in theory but it just doesn’t work.”

— Edward Abbey

171. “We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.”

— Edward Abbey

172. “Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.”

— Edward Abbey

173. “In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.”

— Edward Abbey

174. “I’m in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I’m an animal.”

— Edward Abbey

175. “I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess – and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.”

— Edward Abbey

176. “A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.”

— Edward Abbey

177. “Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.”

— Edward Abbey

178. “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare, said a wise man. If so, what happens to excellence when we eliminate the difficulty and the rarity?”

— Edward Abbey

179. “Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.”

— Edward Abbey

180. “I’d sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.”

— Edward Abbey

181. “Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.”

— Edward Abbey

182. “If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully – as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.”

— Edward Abbey

183. “Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.”

— Edward Abbey

184. “If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.”

— Edward Abbey

185. “Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.”

— Edward Abbey

186. “The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.”

— Edward Abbey

187. “If it’s knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.”

— Edward Abbey

188. “The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan.”

— Edward Abbey

189. “In history-as-politics, the ‘future’ is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen.”

— Edward Abbey

190. “Those who dream of the joys of living in a space colony should live in a space colony.”

— Edward Abbey

191. “If you feel that you’re not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.”

— Edward Abbey

192. “Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.”

— Edward Abbey

193. “From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.”

— Edward Abbey

194. “This world may be only illusion – but it’s the only illusion we’ve got.”

— Edward Abbey

195. “Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.”

— Edward Abbey

196. “Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.”

— Edward Abbey

197. “The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.”

— Edward Abbey

198. “You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.”

— Edward Abbey

199. “Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.”

— Edward Abbey

200. “Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.”

— Edward Abbey