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It is not enough to understand the natural world the point is to defend and preserve it.

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
Defend
Point
Natural
Understand
Nature
Enough
World
Preserve
Preserves

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward Abbey
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When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.
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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.
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If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.
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A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.
Edward Abbey
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There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
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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The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.
Edward Abbey
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For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
Edward Abbey
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Our contemporary Tories prefer the term 'ordered liberty' to 'freedom'. The word 'freedom' scares them it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.
Edward Abbey
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Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
Edward Abbey
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If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully -- as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.
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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Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.
Edward Abbey
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Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.
Edward Abbey
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In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.
Edward Abbey
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I would prefer to write about everything what else is there? But one must be selective.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.
Edward Abbey
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A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.
Edward Abbey