The Late Edward Abbey - Beloved Desert Anarchist

A few quotes from a legendary man for you to enjoy.
Nobody will get shot for disagreeing with anything he says.

Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.

Freedom begins between the ears.

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

The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe - fear and awe of the State.

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers - obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

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

War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.

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

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by anything else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.

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

God is love? Not bloody likely.

Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.

The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes 12 years of public schooling and 4 more years of college to beat it out of them.

Whenever I read Time or Newsweek or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?

The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.

Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exhalts and glorifies the rebel.

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.

J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty - you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.

Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.

Government should be weak, amaturish and ridiculous. At present it fulfills only a third of the role.

Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.

There never was a good war or a bad revolution.

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.

I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?

Our "neo-conservatives" are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.

In social affairs I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military-industrial civilization will soon collapse.

All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self-justifying - a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.

The tragedy of modern war is not so much that young men die but that they die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

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

All power rests on hierarchy: an army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.

There has got to be a God; the world could not have become so fucked up by chance alone.