Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they’d be intolerable.”

— Edward Abbey

352. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

355. “Grown men do not need leaders.”

— Edward Abbey

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

361. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

364. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

367. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

378. “If you feel that you’re not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

382. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

384. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

388. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

390. “Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.”

— Edward Abbey

391. “Life is hard? True – but let’s love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.”

— Edward Abbey

392. “The result of this bestial lust is an indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of all of my energies- wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

395. “No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.”

— Edward Abbey

396. “I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

398. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

400. “Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.”

— Edward Abbey