EDWARD ABBEY QUOTES II

American author (1927-1989)

I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.

EDWARD ABBEY

"The First Morning", Desert Solitaire

Tags: space travel


Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

EDWARD ABBEY

One Life at a Time, Please

Tags: anarchy, democracy


Let us hope our weapons are never needed -- but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

EDWARD ABBEY

Abbey's Road

Tags: guns


Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death.

EDWARD ABBEY

Down the River

Tags: love


The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Tags: democracy


A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Water", Desert Solitaire


All living things on earth are kindred.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Serpents of Paradise", Desert Solitaire

Tags: life


Grab a woman. Help the movement. Liberate a woman tonight. You'll get stale out here in the woods, living like a bear. Your balls will shrink, your tongue grow stiff and heavy. Your mind will wither away. Whatever became of William Gatlin? Went mad flogging his bloody duff.

EDWARD ABBEY

The Serpents of Paradise

Tags: women


I am not an atheist but an earthiest.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Down the River", Desert Solitaire

Tags: atheism


I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Serpents of Paradise", Desert Solitaire


Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

EDWARD ABBEY

"The Crooked Wood", The Journey Home

Tags: men


Money attracts because it gives us the means to command the labor and service and finally the lives of others--human or otherwise.

EDWARD ABBEY

The Serpents of Paradise

Tags: money


No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Tags: tyranny


The most attractive feature of Alaska, I say, is its small, insignificant human population.

EDWARD ABBEY

Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside


The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Tags: war, death


There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Walking", The Journey Home

Tags: walking


We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.

EDWARD ABBEY

Abbey's Road


What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)


When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

EDWARD ABBEY

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)

Tags: dogs


When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes -- disease and death and the rotting of flesh.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Down the River", Desert Solitaire

Tags: paradise