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Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

Edward Abbey

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Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Always
Corrupts
Attracts
Heresy
Anarchy
Dangerous
Worst
Power
Best

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.
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.
Edward Abbey
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My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.
Edward Abbey
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No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn sight better.
Edward Abbey
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Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)
Edward Abbey
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The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
Edward Abbey
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Our contemporary Tories prefer the term 'ordered liberty' to 'freedom'. The word 'freedom' scares them it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.
Edward Abbey
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A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.
Edward Abbey
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May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
Edward Abbey
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Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
Edward Abbey
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King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.
Edward Abbey
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From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
Edward Abbey
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Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit's weak.
Edward Abbey
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A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
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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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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There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last
Edward Abbey
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Little boys love machines girls adore horses grown-up men and women like to walk.
Edward Abbey