Quotes by Edward Abbey

"Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette."

"The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow."

"The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war."

"If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream."

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

"Why must love always be accompanied--sooner or later--by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots."

"We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us."

"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."

"According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum". I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces."

"When I hear the word "culture", I reach for my checkbook."

"New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?"

"Running the big rapids is like sex: half the fun lies in the anticipation. Two thirds of the thrill with the approach. The remainder is only ecstasy-or darkness."

"As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is *action*. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth."

"The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused."

"The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe."

"Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland."

"Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront."

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders."

"There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love."

"Life is unfair. And it's not fair that life is unfair."

"I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact
I work only under duress."

"A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more
grotesque, like a soul without a body."

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit."

"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."

"In my case, saving the world was only a hobby."

"Saving the world was merely a hobby. My *vocation* has been that of
inspector of desert water holes."

"Life is hard? True--but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in
our bodies."

"Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true."

"Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily
understand: Man is not a lovable animal."

"One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers."

"The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich."

"Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice."

"Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit."

"The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North
Star, to serve as a guiding point."

"What is truth? I don't know and I'm sorry I brought it up."

"There are no vacant lots in nature."

"A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist."

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

"Voluntary simplicity."

"Scientific method: There's a madness in the method."

"There has got to be a God; the world could not have become so fucked up by
chance alone."

"It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and
preserve it."

"Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through."

"God bless America. Let's save some of it."

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

"Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough."

"I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not
realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers."

"Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the
basic tyrant of the modern age."

"Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature."

"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?"

"As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases."

"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of
scum on top."

"But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - if only we had eyes to see."