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All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.

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
Liberty
Form
Government
Good
Pernicious
Forms
Including

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A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
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You can't belay a man who's falling in love.
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Salome had but seven veils the artist has a thousand.
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In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.
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Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.
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Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
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Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
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It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.
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I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.
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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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The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.
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How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
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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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We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
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Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.
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By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.
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This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.
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In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.
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This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
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In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.
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