Edward Abbey

In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.

Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.

What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of_x000D_ love.

Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.

Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.

It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.

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

Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.

Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.

We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races -- by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.