Ed Abbey died decades ago, and a couple friends carried his body out to the desert and buried it illegally, just like he wanted. It was a fitting statement for a man who spent his life loving the desert and wilderness, and raising hell about protecting it.
We love Abbey for his passion for canyon country, his cantankerous attitude, and his eternal quotability. If you’ve read his books, you’ve probably underlined a passage or twelve. You’re not the only one. We collected our favorite quotes, so put these in your pipe and smoke ’em. Cactus Ed was probably puffing on his when he came up with them. If we missed your favorite, add it in the comments.
1. “How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”
2. “The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”
3. “Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.”
4. “Freedom begins between the ears.”
5. “I’ve never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn’t have written much better myself.”
6. “Belief? What do I believe in? 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…”
7. “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 thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.”
8. “This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. 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.”
9. “I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a ‘surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow’. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.”
10. “A world without open country would be universal jail.”
11. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. 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.”
12. “There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details.”
13. “If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies’ territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”
14. “There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”
15. “I stand for what I stand on.”
16. “I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that’s patriotism.”
17. “Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”
18. “When the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about.”
19. “I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.”
20. “High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.”
21. “Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.”
22. “Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.”
23. “There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.”
When’s the last time you read yourself some Abbey? Get him here:
Desert Solitaire
The Monkeywrench Gang
Fire on the Mountain
Hayduke Lives!
The Best of Edward Abbey
My favorite Ed Abbey quote: Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Mine too.By far.
Love this! And could it be more timely?!
That quote was on my office door for many years
I appreciate that everyone these days needs a sponsor, but it flies in the face of everything he was to have his work sponsored by an over hyped overpriced device to keep you beer cold!
You forgot the best one…
“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. 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 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 where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”
If a man can’t piss in his own front yard he’s living too close to town.
“Ah, poor Phoenix. It was never a real city anyway.” –Good News
“We live in a society where it is normal to be sick and sick to be abnormal”
I had this one plastered over my desk in the BLM…
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
Some time ago I printed this out and stuck it on my wall. I’m not normally one for inspirational quotes. Thanks for reminding me of it.
Hell yes. This is my favorite.
“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”
This one is my favorite.
Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
I’ll have to re-read the Monkeywrench Gang, what a wild story. As for these quotes, my favs are #11 and #12.
And now I must plan a trip to the Utah desert, it has been too long since I’ve been.
If I were a stronger man, a more independent man, I could pronounce his quotes with total conviction; nevertheless, I can still share them as ideals. After just reading Abbey’s “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness” – his collection of epigrams published shortly before his death – I can use it as my guidebook for thought and political activism, if need be. Me thinks we’re gonna need a whole lot of E.A.
“One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a business man and a dollar bill.”
In honor of Ed’s birthday don’t forget to piss off your front porch.
He was too full of himself by half. Make that three quarters. Probably seven eighths.
Eons ago, while in college, Abbey spoke on our campus. I had briefly heard of his new book, Desert Solitaire, & after his presentation got it. Later that spring I drove with a friend to Glacier National Park and “in town” that eve we ran into Abbey again. He told us he came “down” for supplies and was headed back to his fire lookout, & he mentioned the name of another “lookout” partner Doug Peacock (who he later modeled as Hayduke in MWG). I also ran into Abbey before he died, when he was at Ken Sleights place S of Moab (Seldom Seen Smith); he was in bad health and died not too much later. After that a memorial N of Moab which I got to, the environmental and naturalist bands there in force. Abbey was a genius and gifted writer, but also a flawed human, father and husband; and much that has been written about (and some by) him is myth. The quotes are like “pieces” of him though, in a time warp of sorts, as he wouldn’t recognize Moab, Tuscon or the Phoenix valley today. Thank you for the well done piece and a big salute to the wild eyed iconic rebel that finally rode into the sunset in a blaze of glory.
wasatchcascade
We rubbed shoulders that blustery morning north of Moab. Sat off in the corner with my son in diapers listening to folks talk of a man I never met. But a man who spoke to me so well in his books. Will never forget how the American flag kept getting blown over at the most impromptu of times!
Enjoy Life
“(I)t occurs to some of us that perhaps ever-continuing industrial and population growth is not the true road to human happiness, that simple gross quantitative increase of this kind creates only more pain, dislocation, confusion and misery. In which case it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-generically impoverished people. At least until we have brought our own affairs into order. Especially when these uninvited millions bring with them an alien mode of life which—let us be honest about this—is not appealing to the majority of Americans. Why not? Because we prefer democratic government, for one thing; because we still hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful—yes, beautiful!—society, for another. The alternative, in the squalor, cruelty, and corruption of Latin America, is plain for all to see.” -Ed Abbey
If he were still around, Cactus Ed might have been thrown out of today’s cool kids club?
“We were desert mystics, my friends and I, the kind who read maps as others read their holy books. I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.“
From his essay “How It Was”
A friend introduced me to Abbey several years back while trail building in southern Utah. Apparently it was a crime I hadn’t read his work before moving out there. Like many here, I immediately connected with his words. When I read “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” I knew we were going to find ourselves on the same page often. I revisit his works each year before my annual pilgrimage back to the region.
Big thank you to the comment section for reminding me of some of my favorite Abbey quotes, the author missed a few.
“Wilderness is the only thing left worth saving”
Met Ed camped under a bluff shelter in the proposed Upper Buffalo Wilderness Area. Just the creek, the snow, the fire, and DS. Perfect.
“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”
Ed’s views on immigration would definitely be as being somewhere around Steven Miller, these days. Just not P.C, I’m afraid!
On a lighter note:
“We don’t go into the wilderness to exhibit our skills at gourmet cooking. We go into the wilderness to get away from the kind of people who think gourmet cooking is important.” E. Abbey