Edward Abbey Men Quotations

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.

A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.

The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.

If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.

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.

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.

There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

Grown men do not need leaders.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature.

No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn sight better.

An empty man is full of himself.

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.

There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.

In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.

Beware of the man who has no enemies.

A man's duty? To be ready -- with rifle or rood -- to defend his home when the showdown comes.

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.

We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.

A man without a horse is like a man without a weapon: stunted and naked.

Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.

You can't belay a man who's falling in love.

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.

Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles....

We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races -- by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.

I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans.... And rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.

John Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest *living* author: Hold a chilled mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing -- like a faery breath! -- upon the glass.

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.

Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word 'rebellion'; the word 'revolt'; the word 'revolution'.

No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.

Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be -- a man.

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.

Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.

Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.

Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

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.

WEALTH AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT: Let us define the wealthy man as he who has everything he desires. How to reach that happy condition? Two ways

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.

Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.

In the land of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, one brave and honest man is bound to create a scandal.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

Man was created to complete the horse.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.

A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.

Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)

In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.