Quote

The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war for nationalism identification with something bigger than the self.

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
War
Basketball
Acceptable
Transference
Form
Function
Frustration
Identification
Self
Bigger
Boredom
Socially
Something
Football
Temporary
Nationalism
Modern
Soccer
Substitute
Sports
Rage
Industrial
Passion
Forms
Substitutes
Society
Anger
Combat

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In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.
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Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace -- a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.
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To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?
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Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.
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Simplicity is always a virtue.
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Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
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Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
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Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.
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If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dream.
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What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
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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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The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.
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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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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
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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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A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.
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I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.
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Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much more.
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Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?
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The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
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