Edward Abbey

Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

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.

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

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.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.

The result of this bestial lust is an indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of all of my energies- wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.

Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.

Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.

Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race.

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.

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)