Buzz Floyd > Buzz's Quotes

“Water, water, water....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.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.”
― Edward Abbey

“Gluttony - that's my vice & curse. I want too much of everything. Books... Love... Music... Color & Form... Philosophy... Travel & Adventure... the result of this bestial lust is the indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of my energies - wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.”
― Edward Abbey

“One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.”
― Edward Abbey, Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside

“What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.”
― Edward Abbey

“In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.”
― Edward Abbey

“the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone, and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny...The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert, and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism.”
― Edward Abbey

“Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“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.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“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, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“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.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“An empty man is full of himself.”
― Edward Abbey

“my god! i'm thinking, what incredible shit we've put up with most of our lives - the domestic routine (same old jobs, insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessman, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and tv machines and telephones -! ah christ!, i'm thinking, at the same time that i'm waving goodby to that hollering idiot on shore, what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote)”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Not all questions can be answered.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”
― Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey

“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.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“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.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“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.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.”
― Edward Abbey

“What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”
― Edward Abbey

“All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?”
― Edward Abbey

“The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.”
― Edward Abbey

“Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“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”
― Edward Abbey

“Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive and the limp.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast