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Human
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Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.
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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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.
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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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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The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.
Edward Abbey
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Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.
Edward Abbey
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There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
Edward Abbey
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One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.
Edward Abbey
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Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.
Edward Abbey
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Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.
Edward Abbey
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You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.
Edward Abbey
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According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum." I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces.
Edward Abbey
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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
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Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.
Edward Abbey
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Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.
Edward Abbey
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America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.
Edward Abbey
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If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
Edward Abbey
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The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.
Edward Abbey
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By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.
Edward Abbey
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To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.
Edward Abbey
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I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.
Edward Abbey
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Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history.
Edward Abbey
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Edward Abbey
Born:
January 29, 1927
Died:
March 14, 1989
(aged 62)
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