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All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?

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
Existence
Else
Government
Need
Needs
Governments
Justify
Enemies
Enemy

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Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature they distort it.
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Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.
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Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.
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The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.
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I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
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Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.
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Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.
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When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
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Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.
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A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
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In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.
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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.
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Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.
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It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?
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Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
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Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
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Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.
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Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
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The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.
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There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
Edward Abbey