Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The dog’s life is a good life, for a dog.”

— Edward Abbey

302. “The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee- pad conservative...”

— Edward Abbey

303. “When in doubt about drinking from an unknown spring look for life. If the water is scummed with algae, crawling with worms, grubs, larvae, spiders and liver flukes, be reassured, drink hearty, you’ll get nothing worse than dysentery. But if it appears innocent and pure, beware.”

— Edward Abbey

304. “Democracy – rule by the people – sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.”

— Edward Abbey

305. “A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

308. “Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I’ve always found the second approach the more pleasing.”

— Edward Abbey

309. “Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

313. “A pretty girl can do no wrong.”

— Edward Abbey

314. “Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.”

— Edward Abbey

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

330. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

333. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

336. “I stand for what I stand on.”

— Edward Abbey

337. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

340. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

343. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

345. “Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be – a man.”

— Edward Abbey

346. “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

347. “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

348. “Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they’d be intolerable.”

— Edward Abbey

349. “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

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

— Edward Abbey