Edward Abbey

The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone - and to no one.

One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city - as I once did for a couple of years.

The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t much matter whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.

Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.

Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace -- a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.

It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.

Wilderness begins in the human mind.

If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.

It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.

The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.

The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.