Best Edward Abbey Quotes
Edward Abbey Quotes About Nature, The Desert, Love, Death, Desert Solitaire, Inspirational, Wilderness & Government! Edward Abbey is an American environmentalist author whose books are primarily set in the southwest United States. Born on January 29, 1927, he grew up in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the United States of America. In 1951 Abbey graduated from the University of New Mexico; then he went on to get a master’s degree in English (1956). Additionally, worked for the National Park Service in the Southwest; he became acquainted with the scenery, which shaped his literary career. He was a park ranger and a fire lookout.
Abbey saw the fading traces of old Indian civilizations and the rise of modern consumer culture in the area. Abbey, a lengthy contemplation on the beautiful and frightening desert of southern Utah and human intrusion into it, is the subject of Desert Solitaire (1968), regarded by many to be his finest work, and the ecological band known as The Monkey Wrench Gang is the subject of Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has since become one of the most widely read works in environmental literature.
In many of Abbey’s works, a sharp literary style and sly humor soften the pessimism. Unorthodox advice: “This is what you must do: Love the environment, sun, and animals.” Naturalism and skepticism of the current state were themes that echoed far into the 1980s. In March 1989, he died away. Slickrock (1971), Abbey’s Road (1979), and The Fool’s Progress (1988) all feature in his enormous past work (1988). There was a posthumous sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang in 1990 that did call Hayduke Lives!
Best Edward Abbey Quotes
1. “I have a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting.”– Edward Abbey
2. “Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast, a part time crusader, a half hearted fanatic.”– Edward Abbey
3. “You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.”– Edward Abbey
4. “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against the government.”– Edward Abbey
5. “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”– Edward Abbey
6. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”– Edward Abbey
7. “The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”– Edward Abbey
8. “Where there is no joy, there can be no courage, and without courage all other virtues are useless.”– Edward Abbey
9. “Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.”– Edward Abbey
10. “…where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm.”– Edward Abbey
11. “May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view, May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”– Edward Abbey
12. “Grown men do not need leaders.”– Edward Abbey
13. “Life is already too short to waste on speed.”– Edward Abbey
14. “The fear of death follows from the fear of life.”– Edward Abbey
15. “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”– Edward Abbey
16. “The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach.”– Edward Abbey
17. “The best thing about graduating from university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”– Edward Abbey
18. “May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest…– Edward Abbey
19. “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.”– Edward Abbey
20. “I’ve never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn’t have written much better myself.”– Edward Abbey
21. “I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.”– Edward Abbey
22. “Freedom begins between the ears.”– Edward Abbey
23. “There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”– Edward Abbey
24. “Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.”– Edward Abbey
25. “A world without open country would be universal jail.”– Edward Abbey
26. “I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom tailed horses.”– Edward Abbey
27. “In the first place you can’t see anything from a car, you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thorn bush and cactus.”– Edward Abbey
28. “I stand for what I stand on.”– Edward Abbey
29. “I despise my own nation the most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that’s patriotism.”– Edward Abbey
30. “Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists.”– Edward Abbey
