American author (1927-1989)
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Oh! For love, for the painfully nourished, tenderly cherished, sweet frenzies illusion, the known-illusion within the globule of sentimental cynicism. For romantic love, then, I sacrifice honor, decensy, human kindness, charity, honesty, friendship and the future -- all, (ah!) for love!
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
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)
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)
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
EDWARD ABBEY
Down the River
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
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
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)
Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
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
There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Gather at the River", Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
The desert rat carries one distinction like a halo: he has learned to love the kind of country that most people find unlovable.
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Water", Desert Solitaire
Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time, Please
Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
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)
I am not an atheist but an earthiest.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Down the River", Desert Solitaire
All living things on earth are kindred.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Serpents of Paradise", Desert Solitaire
A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.
EDWARD ABBEY
One Life at a Time, Please