Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

353. “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

354. “Grown men do not need leaders.”

— Edward Abbey

355. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

363. “The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life,” the doctor said. “Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness.” He sipped at his bourbon and ice. “Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal.” Another thought. “And the universe goes mad.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

368. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

382. “The sensation of freedom was exhilarating, though tinged with a shade of loneliness, a touch of sorrow. The old dream of total independence, beholden to no man and no woman, floated above his days like smoke from a pipe dream, like a silver cloud with a dark lining. For even Hayduke sensed, when he faced the thing directly, that the total loner would go insane. Was insane. Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wildness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”

— Edward Abbey

383. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

386. “What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

389. “Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

392. “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

393. “I wouldn’t trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made – unless I could trade the Rolls for two good horses.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

395. “There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.”

— Edward Abbey

396. “Science transcends mere politics. As recent history demonstrates, scientists are as willing to work for a Tojo, a Hitler, or a Stalin as for the free nations of the West.”

— Edward Abbey

397. “Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.”

— Edward Abbey

398. “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

399. “Women who love only women may have a good point.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey