Quote

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

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
Fire
Woods
High
Drawing
Simple
Tasks
Water
Delight
Done
Service
Primordial
Great
Spring
Chopping
Building
Wood
Technology
Performing

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The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
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Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables
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It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.
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Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses -- they tie -- who cares? And why?
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When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
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The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.
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What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
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The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
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If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.
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All governments require enemy governments.
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Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him he harms nobody and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
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Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
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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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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.
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In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.
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Guns don't kill people people kill people. Of course, people with guns kill more people. But that's only natural. It's hard. But it's fair.
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That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.
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A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.
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Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.
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Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives reclining. They can't quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position.
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