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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
Enemy
Existence
Else
Government
Need
Needs
Governments
Justify
Enemies

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James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.
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To be alive is to take risks to be always safe and secure is death.
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The sense of justice springs from self-respect both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them.
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What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?
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The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.
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I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.
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In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.
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The result of this bestial lust is an indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of all of my energies- wanting all, I accomplish nothing desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.
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Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.
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Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.
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There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
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Concrete is heavy iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.
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It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.
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I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.
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New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?
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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.
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God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.
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I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.
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Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.
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In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse.
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