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Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
Edward Abbey -
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.
Edward Abbey
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I am not an atheist but an earthiest.
Edward Abbey -
Growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness.
Edward Abbey -
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.
Edward Abbey -
Among politicians and businessman, Pragmatism is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'
Edward Abbey -
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 -
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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I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.
Edward Abbey -
'There is no situation so bad that the cops can't make it worse.'
Edward Abbey -
Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.
Edward Abbey -
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may not ever need to go there.
Edward Abbey -
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 -
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
Edward Abbey
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I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.
Edward Abbey -
Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.
Edward Abbey -
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey -
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
Edward Abbey -
'Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.'
Edward Abbey -
Concerning river runners: If we were going into war again I can't think of any I'd rather have on our side. I mean, all of these good men and women. And if they were on the other side I'd join the other side.
Edward Abbey
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Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
Edward Abbey -
God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.
Edward Abbey -
Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.
Edward Abbey -
We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
Edward Abbey