Edward Abbey World Quotations

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.

Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.

In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

Saving the world was merely a hobby. My *vocation* has been that of inspector of desert water holes.

The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.

This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.

The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

A world without open country would be universal jail.

If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.

We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.

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

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.

The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.

Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.

Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy. . . . Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.