American author (1927-1989)
The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.
EDWARD ABBEY
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"Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night", The Journey Home
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge", The Journey Home
Money attracts because it gives us the means to command the labor and service and finally the lives of others--human or otherwise.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely an illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Everyone should learn a manual trade. It's never too late to become an honest person.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
The most attractive feature of Alaska, I say, is its small, insignificant human population.
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
The desert rat carries one distinction like a halo: he has learned to love the kind of country that most people find unlovable.
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
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.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Gather at the River", Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
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.
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
I try to think of a favorite among my arid-country flowers. But I love them all. How could we be true to one without being false to all the others?
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
We like the taste of freedom ... because we like the smell of danger.
EDWARD ABBEY
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
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.
EDWARD ABBEY
"The Dead Man at Grandview Point", Desert Solitaire
Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Water", Desert Solitaire