Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.”

— Edward Abbey

302. “There is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.”

— Edward Abbey

303. “A world without open country would be universal jail.”

— Edward Abbey

304. “Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.”

— Edward Abbey

305. “Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.”

— Edward Abbey

306. “Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.”

— Edward Abbey

307. “Nature, like Miamonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.”

— Edward Abbey

308. “The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow’s reality.”

— Edward Abbey

309. “A pretty girl can do no wrong.”

— Edward Abbey

310. “There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last.”

— Edward Abbey

311. “What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?”

— Edward Abbey

312. “High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.”

— Edward Abbey

313. “In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.”

— Edward Abbey

314. “Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses – they tie – who cares? And why?”

— Edward Abbey

315. “It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.”

— Edward Abbey

316. “When the philosopher’s argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.”

— Edward Abbey

317. “When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.”

— Edward Abbey

318. “A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.”

— Edward Abbey

319. “Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.”

— Edward Abbey

320. “The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.”

— Edward Abbey

321. “The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence.”

— Edward Abbey

322. “The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.”

— Edward Abbey

323. “I stand for what I stand on.”

— Edward Abbey

324. “Vaughan Telecom installers and contractors ensure the highest quality service for data and network cabling in Toronto and GTA area.”

— Edward Abbey

325. “I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.”

— Edward Abbey

326. “I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.”

— Edward Abbey

327. “Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.”

— Edward Abbey

328. “I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I’ve encountered some unnecessary resistance that’s because most of the traffic is going the other way.”

— Edward Abbey

329. “Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.”

— Edward Abbey

330. “Everyone should learn a manual trade: It’s never too late to become an honest person.”

— Edward Abbey

331. “One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers.”

— Edward Abbey

332. “There never was a good war or a bad revolution.”

— Edward Abbey

333. “Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.”

— Edward Abbey

334. “It is not the writer’s task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.”

— Edward Abbey

335. “All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.”

— Edward Abbey

336. “The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in it’s way, when true to it’s own character, is equally beautiful. If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful-that which is full of wonder.”

— Edward Abbey

337. “One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.”

— Edward Abbey

338. “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

339. “My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’ll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don’t give a damn.’”

— Edward Abbey

340. “I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.”

— Edward Abbey

341. “My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.”

— Edward Abbey

342. “We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.”

— Edward Abbey

343. “Walking makes the world much bigger and therefore more interesting.”

— Edward Abbey

344. “As between the skulking and furtive poacher, who hunts for the sake of meat, and the honest gentleman shooter, who kills for the pleasure of sport, I find the former a higher type of humanity.”

— Edward Abbey

345. “I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.”

— Edward Abbey

346. “The best American writers have come from the hinterlands – Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.”

— Edward Abbey

347. “That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.”

— Edward Abbey

348. “Wilderness and motors are incompatible and the former can best be experienced, understood and enjoyed when the machines are left behind where they belong – on the superhighways and in the parking lots, on the reservoirs and in the marinas.”

— Edward Abbey

349. “The artist’s job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live...”

— Edward Abbey

350. “Truth is merely common sense, say the naive realist. Really? Then where, precisely, is the location of – a rainbow? In the air? In the eye? In between? Or somewhere else?”

— Edward Abbey