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Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.

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
Spontaneous
Charity
Affront
Calculated
Altruism

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.
Edward Abbey
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My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.
Edward Abbey
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In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.
Edward Abbey
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I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress.
Edward Abbey
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Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
Edward Abbey
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Why this cult of wilderness?... because we like the taste of freedom because we like the smell of danger.
Edward Abbey
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My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.
Edward Abbey
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Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
Edward Abbey
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A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.
Edward Abbey
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Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.
Edward Abbey
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Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking namely, life.
Edward Abbey
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I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.
Edward Abbey
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Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
Edward Abbey
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Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.
Edward Abbey
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Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.
Edward Abbey
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Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.
Edward Abbey
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The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.
Edward Abbey
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But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.
Edward Abbey