Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.”

— Edward Abbey

352. “Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.”

— Edward Abbey

353. “Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.”

— Edward Abbey

354. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

356. “I wish to be an inspector of volcanoes. I want to study cloud formations and memorize the wind and learn by heart the habits of the ponderosa pine.”

— Edward Abbey

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them.”

— Edward Abbey

361. “The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages – as if the savages weren’t dangerous enough already.”

— Edward Abbey

362. “Grown men do not need leaders.”

— Edward Abbey

363. “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

364. “I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.”

— Edward Abbey

365. “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

366. “The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

368. “In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.”

— Edward Abbey

369. “We’re all undesirable elements from somebody’s point of view.”

— Edward Abbey

370. “If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

372. “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

373. “Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.”

— Edward Abbey

374. “Why must love always be accompanied – sooner or later – by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots.”

— Edward Abbey

375. “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

376. “Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.”

— Edward Abbey

377. “In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

379. “In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.”

— Edward Abbey

380. “Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are – retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.”

— Edward Abbey

381. “Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.”

— Edward Abbey

382. “How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?”

— Edward Abbey

383. “The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.”

— Edward Abbey

384. “There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.”

— Edward Abbey

385. “Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.”

— Edward Abbey

386. “There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It’s not as easy as it looks.”

— Edward Abbey

387. “A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.”

— Edward Abbey

388. “In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.”

— Edward Abbey

389. “Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.”

— Edward Abbey

390. “Nothing could be more reckless than to base one’s moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.”

— Edward Abbey

391. “I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.”

— Edward Abbey

392. “Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.”

— Edward Abbey

393. “A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.”

— Edward Abbey

394. “Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.”

— Edward Abbey

395. “Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.”

— Edward Abbey

396. “Whatever we cannot understand easily we call God; this saves wear and tear on the brain tissues.”

— Edward Abbey

397. “Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.”

— Edward Abbey

398. “Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.”

— Edward Abbey

399. “In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that’s on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.”

— Edward Abbey

400. “Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.”

— Edward Abbey