Edward Abbey

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.

What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.

I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.

Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.

I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans.... And rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

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.

Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.

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

There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.

Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word 'rebellion'; the word 'revolt'; the word 'revolution'.

Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.

In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.

The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

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.

Beware of the man who has no enemies.

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.