Edward Abbey (1927 – 1989)
American writer noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies.
He recalled Dr. Sarvis' favorite apothegm: When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.
When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes — disease and death and the rotting of flesh.
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
The "Terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.
Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever — and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage.
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.
Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for "To hell with our children."
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Of course, people with guns kill more people. But that's only natural. It's hard. But it's fair.
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.
Freedom begins between the ears.
In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.
I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.