Edward Abbey Quotes
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I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
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To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.
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'A pessimist is simply an optimist in full possession of the facts.'
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There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
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The plow has probably done more harm - in the long run - than the sword.
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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!)
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A great thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
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Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
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With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.
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When I write 'paradise' I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.
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Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism.
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In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
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One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever - and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage.
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I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.
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The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
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What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money.
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The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.
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Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
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Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.
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All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
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From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
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Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
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I am not an atheist but an earthiest.
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Knowing now what we have learned, unless the need were urgent, I could no more sink the blade of an ax into the tissues of a living tree than I could drive it into the flesh of a fellow human.