Edward Abbey (1927 – 1989)
American writer noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies.
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
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.
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.
As for the "solitary confinement of the mind," my theory is that solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses (bad for brains) and conversation-clogged seminars. To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may not ever need to go there.
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us--if only we were worthy of it.
We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
Come on in. The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone — and to no one.
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a Juniper tree or the wings of a vulture-that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving.
There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
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.
A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.