American author (1927-1989)
Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time, Please
At that moment I was ready to forsake my other home, forsake my mother and father and little sister and all my friends, and spend the rest of my life in the desert eating cactus for lunch, drinking blood at cocktail time, and letting the ferocious sun flay me skin and soul. I'd gladly have traded parents, school, a college education and a career for one dependable saddle hourse. Later that night, of course, alone in bed, the deadly homesickness would strike me faint.
EDWARD ABBEY
Fire on the Mountain
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Everyone should learn a manual trade. It's never too late to become an honest person.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Water", Desert Solitaire
I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well--about a mile. Two miles.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Serpents of Paradise", Desert Solitaire
In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.
EDWARD ABBEY
Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death.
EDWARD ABBEY
Down the River
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
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
Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
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
Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Walking is the only form of transportation in which a man proceeds erect -- like a man -- on his own legs, under his own power. There is immense satisfaction in that.
EDWARD ABBEY
Postcards from Ed
We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
EDWARD ABBEY
Abbey's Road
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
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Journey Home