The Monkey Wrench Gang Quotes

“When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

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

“In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I am against all forms of government, including good government.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“What do we know? What do we really know? He licks his dried cracked lips. We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness." He sipped at his bourbon and ice. "Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal." Another thought. "And the universe goes mad.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“And the wind blows, the dust clouds darken the desert blue, pale sand and red dust drift across the asphalt trails and tumbleweeds fill the arroyos. Good-bye, come again. (p. 34)”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom—goddammit!—herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!—by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I thought I was wrong once,” Seldom said, “but I found out later I was mistaken.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“No one know precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine, for example, or to what degree such woody organisms can feel pain or fear, and in any case the road builders had more important things to worry about, but this much is clearly established as scientific face: a living tree, once uprooted, takes many days to wholly die.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Hayduke thought. Finally the idea arrived. He said, 'My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving. That's simple, right?”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I do love you. I’d be one miserable and lonesome man without you around.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I’m sure as hell not going to fight over her. I got more interesting things to do than that.
There’s nothing more interesting than a woman, George. Not in this world.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“The sensation of freedom was exhilarating, though tinged with a shade of loneliness, a touch of sorrow. The old dream of total independence, beholden to no man and no woman, floated above his days like smoke from a pipe dream, like a silver cloud with a dark lining. For even Hayduke sensed, when he faced the thing directly, that the total loner would go insane. Was insane. Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wildness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Meanwhile the doctor was saying, “The reason there are so many people on the river these days is because there are too many people everywhere else.” Bonnie shivered, slipping into the crook of his left arm. “Why don’t we build a fire?” she said. “The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life,” the doctor said. “Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness.” He sipped at his bourbon and ice. “Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal.” Another thought. “And the universe goes mad.” “We”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I think the evil is in the food, in the noise, in the crowding, in the stress, in the water, in the air.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“You can never go wrong cuttin' fence,' repeated Smith, warming to his task. (Pling!) "Always cut fence. That's the law west of the 100th meridian. East of that don't matter none. Back there it's all lost anyhow. But west, we cut fence,' (Plang!)”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“Like so many American men, Hayduke loved guns, the touch of oil, the acrid smell of burnt powder, the taste of brass, bright copper alloys, good cutlery, all things well made and deadly.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“(Time is relative, said Heraclitus a long time ago, and distance a function of velocity. Since the ultimate goal of transport technology is the annihilation of space, the compression of all Being into one pure point, it follows that six-packs help. Speed is the ultimate drug and rockets run on alcohol.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“The night. The stars. The river.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“All this fantastic effort—giant machines, road networks, strip mines, conveyor belt, pipelines, slurry lines, loading towers, railway and electric train, hundred-million-dollar coal-burning power plant; ten thousand miles of high-tension towers and high-voltage power lines; the devastation of the landscape, the destruction of Indian homes and Indian grazing lands, Indian shrines and Indian burial grounds; the poisoning of the last big clean-air reservoir in the forty-eight contiguous United States, the exhaustion of precious water supplies—all that ball-breaking labor and all that backbreaking expense and all that heartbreaking insult to land and sky and human heart, for what? All that for what? Why, to light the lamps of Phoenix suburbs not yet built, to run the air conditioners of San Diego and Los Angeles, to illuminate shopping-center parking lots at two in the morning, to power aluminum plants, magnesium plants, vinyl-chloride factories and copper smelters, to charge the neon tubing that makes the meaning (all the meaning there is) of Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Tucson, Salt Lake City, the amalgamated metropoli of southern California, to keep alive that phosphorescent putrefying glory (all the glory there is left) called Down Town, Night Time, Wonderville, U.S.A. They”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“She fasted on the mesa rim, waiting for a vision, and fasted some more, and after a time God appeared incarnate on a platter as a roasted squab with white paper booties on His little drumsticks.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“We are caught,” continued the good doctor, “in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang