Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.”

— Edward Abbey

402. “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

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

— Edward Abbey

404. “How can I be so evil? It ain’t easy.”

— Edward Abbey

405. “For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

407. “The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.”

— Edward Abbey

408. “I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life – if I live that long.”

— Edward Abbey

409. “Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.”

— Edward Abbey

410. “Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.”

— Edward Abbey

411. “She fasted on the mesa rim, waiting for a vision, and fasted some more, and after a time God appeared incarnate on a platter as a roasted squab with white paper booties on His little drumsticks.”

— Edward Abbey

412. “Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.”

— Edward Abbey

413. “And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.”

— Edward Abbey

414. “Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

416. “All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.”

— Edward Abbey

417. “Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.”

— Edward Abbey

418. “Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it’s likely that no one is thinking at all.”

— Edward Abbey

419. “Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”

— Edward Abbey

420. “Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?”

— Edward Abbey

421. “There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.”

— Edward Abbey

422. “Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.”

— Edward Abbey

423. “The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners – and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.”

— Edward Abbey

424. “The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.”

— Edward Abbey

425. “One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante’s plastic Paradiso, or Yeats’s gold-plated Byzantium.”

— Edward Abbey

426. “Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler’s massacre of the Jews. Genocide’s an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.”

— Edward Abbey

427. “Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.”

— Edward Abbey

428. “It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God’s obvious love for it.”

— Edward Abbey

429. “Man was created to complete the horse.”

— Edward Abbey

430. “A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.”

— Edward Abbey

431. “It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.”

— Edward Abbey

432. “A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.”

— Edward Abbey

433. “All governments require enemy governments.”

— Edward Abbey

434. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.”

— Edward Abbey

435. “Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn’t.”

— Edward Abbey

436. “My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.”

— Edward Abbey

437. “My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.”

— Edward Abbey

438. “I’m a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.”

— Edward Abbey

439. “My own best books have not been published. In fact, they’ve not even been written yet.”

— Edward Abbey

440. “Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.”

— Edward Abbey

441. “Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.”

— Edward Abbey

442. “There has never been an ‘original’ sin: each is quite banal.”

— Edward Abbey

443. “Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book’s eventual fate.”

— Edward Abbey

444. “But it is a writer’s duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.”

— Edward Abbey

445. “Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.”

— Edward Abbey

446. “My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING – and find it enough.”

— Edward Abbey

447. “Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.”

— Edward Abbey

448. “A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.”

— Edward Abbey

449. “There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author’s self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.”

— Edward Abbey

450. “The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.”

— Edward Abbey