Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.”

— Edward Abbey

202. “We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”

— Edward Abbey

203. “The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.”

— Edward Abbey

204. “Humility is a virtue when you have no other.”

— Edward Abbey

205. “In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.”

— Edward Abbey

206. “Every important change in our society, for the good, at least, has taken place because of popular pressure-pressure from below, from the great mass of people.”

— Edward Abbey

207. “Life: another day, another dolor.”

— Edward Abbey

208. “Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

210. “Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.”

— Edward Abbey

211. “There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation. It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino.”

— Edward Abbey

212. “But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest – next only to lust.”

— Edward Abbey

213. “One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city – as I once did for a couple of years.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

215. “Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.”

— Edward Abbey

216. “If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument.”

— Edward Abbey

217. “Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth.”

— Edward Abbey

218. “The national parks belong to everyone. To the people. To all of us. The government keeps saying so and maybe, in this one case at least, the government is telling the truth. Hard to believe, but possible.”

— Edward Abbey

219. “There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.”

— Edward Abbey

220. “Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.”

— Edward Abbey

221. “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

222. “Running the big rapids is like sex: half the fun lies in the anticipation. Two thirds of the thrill with the approach. The remainder is only ecstasy-or darkness.”

— Edward Abbey

223. “Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.”

— Edward Abbey

224. “Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

228. “All living things on earth are kindred.”

— Edward Abbey

229. “The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything – while the music lasts.”

— Edward Abbey

230. “A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

232. “By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.”

— Edward Abbey

233. “Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.”

— Edward Abbey

234. “Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.”

— Edward Abbey

235. “Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.”

— Edward Abbey

236. “What did Jesus say to the headwaiter at the Last Supper? ‘Separate checks, please.’”

— Edward Abbey

237. “The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life’s basic consolations.”

— Edward Abbey

238. “Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon.”

— Edward Abbey

239. “Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.”

— Edward Abbey

240. “Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.”

— Edward Abbey

241. “If the end does not justify the means – what can?”

— Edward Abbey

242. “Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.”

— Edward Abbey

243. “Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.”

— Edward Abbey

244. “Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.”

— Edward Abbey

245. “In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.”

— Edward Abbey

246. “Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the basic tyrant of the modern age.”

— Edward Abbey

247. “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

248. “If you’re never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You’ve only missed out on one half of life.”

— Edward Abbey

249. “Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace – a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.”

— Edward Abbey

250. “I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.”

— Edward Abbey