110+ Edward Abbey Quotes On Death, Nature And Desert

Edward Abbey was an American author and essayist known for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. He is best known for his book "Desert Solitaire" which is a non-fiction account of his experience as a park ranger in the Arches National Park in Utah. He wrote a number of other books, including "The Monkey Wrench Gang" which is a novel about environmental activists. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Edward Abbey on death, nature, desert.

Top 10 Edward Abbey Quotes

1. The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.
2. To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.
3. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
4. May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
5. I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.
6. A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
7. Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
8. The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.
9. The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.
10. Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?

Edward Abbey Image Quotes

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. — Edward Abbey

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. — Edward Abbey

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative. — Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Short Quotes

• Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.
• In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.
• Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
• The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.
• I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.
• Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.
• From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
• There never was a good war or a bad revolution.
• The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.
• There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.

Edward Abbey Quotes About Death

The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses. — Edward Abbey

Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least. — Edward Abbey

It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy. — Edward Abbey

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice. — Edward Abbey

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. — Edward Abbey

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever. — Edward Abbey

The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often. — Edward Abbey

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy. — Edward Abbey

To be alive is to take risks; to be always safe and secure is death. — Edward Abbey

Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely. — Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Quotes About Nature

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see. — Edward Abbey

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

‎"If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture--that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." E.Abbey — Edward Abbey

This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. — Edward Abbey

The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction. — Edward Abbey

Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature. — Edward Abbey

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

Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature. — Edward Abbey

Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful. — Edward Abbey

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. — Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Quotes About Desert

The desert wears... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting -- but waiting for what? — Edward Abbey

The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom. — Edward Abbey

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

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand. — Edward Abbey

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote. — Edward Abbey

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

If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life. — Edward Abbey

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*. — Edward Abbey

The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization. — Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Quotes About Wild

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant! — Edward Abbey

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself. — Edward Abbey

Narrow-minded provincialism: Sad to say but true - I am more interested in the mountain lions of Utah, the wild pigs of Arizona, than I am in the fate of all the Arabs of Araby, all the Wogs of Hindustan, all the Ethiopes of Abyssinia. — Edward Abbey

The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?) — Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Quotes About Real

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. — Edward Abbey

If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose. — Edward Abbey

Paradise is the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God bless America, the Earth upon which we stand. — Edward Abbey

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork. — Edward Abbey

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality. — Edward Abbey

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience. — Edward Abbey

The author: an imaginary person who writes real books. — Edward Abbey

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it. — Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Quotes About Wilderness

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum. — Edward Abbey

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders. — Edward Abbey

Why wilderness? Because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger. — Edward Abbey

I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one. — Edward Abbey

We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.... We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope. — Edward Abbey

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

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

To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad? — Edward Abbey

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope. — Edward Abbey

The only thing left worth saving is wilderness. — Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Quotes About Idea

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

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously. — Edward Abbey

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it. — Edward Abbey

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

Edward Abbey Quotes About Live

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. — Edward Abbey

We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth! — Edward Abbey

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

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals. — Edward Abbey

Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial. — Edward Abbey

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. — Edward Abbey

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery. — Edward Abbey

We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal. — Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Famous Quotes And Sayings

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. — Edward Abbey

In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not. — Edward Abbey

Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea. — Edward Abbey

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. — Edward Abbey

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. — Edward Abbey

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative. — Edward Abbey

Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps, or a hand grenade, if handy, or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it. — Edward Abbey

To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock. — Edward Abbey

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers. — Edward Abbey

Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel. — Edward Abbey

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

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy. — Edward Abbey

A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear. — Edward Abbey

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

Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. — Edward Abbey

I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. — Edward Abbey

The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information. — Edward Abbey

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. — Edward Abbey

In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time. — Edward Abbey

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

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee. — Edward Abbey

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense. — Edward Abbey

The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know. — Edward Abbey

Cold morning on Aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, build fire in old stove. Second, start coffee. Then, heat up last night's pork chops and spinach for breakfast. Why not? And why the hell not? — Edward Abbey

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers -- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls. — Edward Abbey

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring — Edward Abbey

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful. — Edward Abbey

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy. — Edward Abbey

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law. — Edward Abbey

Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air. — Edward Abbey

I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay. — Edward Abbey

Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter. — Edward Abbey

Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses. — Edward Abbey

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock. — Edward Abbey

Every important change in our society, for the good, at least, has taken place because of popular pressure-pressure from below, from the great mass of people. — Edward Abbey

How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas. — Edward Abbey

Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game — Edward Abbey

A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers. — Edward Abbey

When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws. — Edward Abbey

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height. — Edward Abbey

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. — Edward Abbey

God bless America. Let's try to save some of it. — Edward Abbey

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies. — Edward Abbey

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness. — Edward Abbey

J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty -- you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial. — Edward Abbey

The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares. — Edward Abbey

Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble. — Edward Abbey

There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep. — Edward Abbey

But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust. — Edward Abbey

One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information; (2) coherent knowledge; (3) deep understanding; (4) infinite loving wisdom; (5) no more kidney stones, please. — Edward Abbey

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation. — Edward Abbey

All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob. — Edward Abbey

I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal. — Edward Abbey

All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly. — Edward Abbey

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion. — Edward Abbey

Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either. — Edward Abbey

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront. — Edward Abbey

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak. — Edward Abbey

In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert. — Edward Abbey

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun. — Edward Abbey

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die. — Edward Abbey

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them. — Edward Abbey

I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man. — Edward Abbey

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. — Edward Abbey

Life Lessons by Edward Abbey

1. Edward Abbey taught that living a life of simplicity and purpose is essential to finding true happiness. He advocated for living in harmony with nature and for preserving the environment for future generations.
2. He believed that taking risks and embracing uncertainty is necessary for personal growth and that it is important to appreciate the beauty of the world around us.
3. He encouraged readers to think for themselves, to challenge authority, and to live life to the fullest.