Quote

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

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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
Value
Doomed
Courage
Fearful
Joy
Virtues
Virtue
Quick
Values
Operations
Morose
Doe
Useless
Extinction
Without
Survival
Suspect
Evolution
Suspects

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
Edward Abbey
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The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an equalizer.
Edward Abbey
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For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.
Edward Abbey
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Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
Edward Abbey
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The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.
Edward Abbey
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The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.
Edward Abbey
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The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.
Edward Abbey
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Cold morning on Aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, build fire in old stove. Second, start coffee. Then, heat up last night's pork chops and spinach for breakfast. Why not? And why the hell not?
Edward Abbey
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The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.
Edward Abbey
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One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city - as I once did for a couple of years.
Edward Abbey
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Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature they distort it.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.
Edward Abbey
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A good writer must have more than vin rosé in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.
Edward Abbey
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Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.
Edward Abbey
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Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
Edward Abbey
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Without courage, all other virtues are useless.
Edward Abbey
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Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.
Edward Abbey