Edward Abbey (1927 – 1989)
American writer noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies.
From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
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.
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
Come on in. The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone — and to no one.
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
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.
Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
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.
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.
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.
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.