Edward Abbey

"The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly."

"Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second."

"[Concerning river runners:] If we were going into war again I can't think of any I'd rather have on our side. I mean, all of these good men and women. And if they were on the other side I'd join the other side."

"Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss."

"I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature."

"Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then — May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night."

"If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world implies contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature."

"I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie."

"There's beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere."

"I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. 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."

"'There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.'"

"'Don't let yourself become cynical. Cynicism is a cheap emotion, a craven substitute for thought and action. Cynicism corrodes the will, dulls the conscience, blunts your sense of right and wrong... Stay alert to fine distinctions: become a pessimist like me.'"

"'A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.'"

"As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth."

"When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble."

"Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything."

"One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill."

"Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins."

"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses."

"With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams."

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

"Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper."

"Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for "To hell with our children.""

"Business: Busyness."

"The plow has probably done more harm — in the long run — than the sword."

"Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues."

"From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm."

"According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum." I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces."

"Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart."

"Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion."

"The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny."

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets."

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."

"In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority."

"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws."

"Freedom begins between the ears."

"The "Terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years."

"Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful."

"What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money."

"When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about."

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

"An empty man is full of himself."

"I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving."

"If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness."

"Ohne Zivilcourage sind alle anderen Tugenden nutzlos."

"Das Misstrauen gegenüber dem Witz ist der Anfang der Tyrannei."

""Wachstum um des Wachstums willen ist die Ideologie der Krebszelle." zitiert in Vera Pagin: Underground USA. Texte der alternativen Scene in Amerika. München 1987, S. 10 books.google"