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If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world implies contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.
Edward Abbey
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A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
Edward Abbey
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Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.
Edward Abbey
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Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.
Edward Abbey
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The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. That's the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn't much matter whether you get where you're going or not. You'll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.
Edward Abbey
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Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
Edward Abbey
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My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.
Edward Abbey
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Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy.... Speaking of paranoia, it's true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I'm paranoid.
Edward Abbey
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Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.
Edward Abbey
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I always write with my.357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
Edward Abbey
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'There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.'
Edward Abbey
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I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact
I work only under duress.
Edward Abbey
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J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty — you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.
Edward Abbey
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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
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Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.
Edward Abbey
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I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.
Edward Abbey
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In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.
Edward Abbey
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I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. (Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!)
Edward Abbey
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Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.
Edward Abbey
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The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.
Edward Abbey
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Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily
understand: Man is not a lovable animal.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
Edward Abbey
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Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
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Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.
Edward Abbey
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Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Edward Abbey
Born:
January 29, 1927
Died:
March 14, 1989
(aged 62)
Bio:
Edward Paul Abbey was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views.
Known for:
Desert Solitaire (1968)
The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)
The Fool's Progress (1988)
The Brave Cowboy (1956)
Hayduke Lives
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