Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Edward Abbey

American Author and Essayist noted for advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies

"1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California?s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic."

"A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow."

"A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak."

"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."

"A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society."

"A genius is always on duty; even his dreams are tax deductible."

"A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat."

"A drink a day keeps the shrink away."

"A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time."

"A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger."

"A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously."

"A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse."

"A house built on greed cannot long endure."

"A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time."

"A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink."

"A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear."

"A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, power-lines, 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."

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

"A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically?"

"A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most non-privileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter."

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

"A life without tragedy would not be worth living."

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

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

"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."

"A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it. A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity."

"A pretty girl can do no wrong."

"A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers."

"A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage."

"A sinister element pervaded the flow of time."

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."

"A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Castaneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and The Last Whole Earth Catalog."

"A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization."

"A treasure not in money but in beauty."

"A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon."

"A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist."

"A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us?like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness?that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures."

"A wisp of bluish smoke goes up and the wood, arid as the rock from which it came blossoms out in fire."

"A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches - that is the right and privilege of any free American."

"A wall of water. A poor image. For the flash flood of the desert poorly resembles water. It looks rather like a loose pudding or a thick dense soup, thick as gravy, dense with mud and sand, lathered with scuds of bloody froth, loaded on its crest with a tangle of weeds and shrubs and small trees ripped from their roots."

"A world without open country would be universal jail."

"A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum."

"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."

"Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State."

"Above the mesa the sun hangs behind streaks and streamers of wind-whipped clouds. More storms coming."

"According to the current doctrines of mystic-scientism, 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."

"A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal."

"After supper I put on hat and coat and go outside again, sit on the table, and watch the sky and the desert dissolve slowly into mystery under the chemistry of twilight."

"Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers."

"Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either."