Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Abbey

Abbey lands the line like a switchblade: not an argument, a diagnosis. By yoking “growth” to “cancer,” he hijacks a word that American culture treats as automatically virtuous - bigger economy, bigger cities, bigger quarterly returns - and forces it into the moral category of disease. The phrase “for the sake of growth” is the trapdoor. He’s not attacking change, or even prosperity; he’s attacking the emptiness of a goal that justifies itself, a looped logic that can’t answer the simplest question: growth toward what, and for whom?

The subtext is ecological and political. Abbey, writing out of the desert West and its postwar boom, watched extraction and development get sold as destiny: dams, highways, suburban sprawl, tourism as an industry that eats the very landscape it markets. His metaphor makes that worldview sound not merely misguided but predatory - a system that consumes its host while insisting it’s “healthy” because the numbers keep rising.

It also carries a bracing anti-corporate edge before that language became mainstream. “Ideology” implies doctrine, not accident: growth becomes a faith that crowds out other values like stability, beauty, restraint, and community. The line works because it’s rude in a clarifying way. Cancer cells aren’t evil; they’re indifferent. That’s Abbey’s bleak suggestion about institutions addicted to expansion: they don’t hate the world they’re degrading. They just can’t stop.