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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
World
Preserve
Preserves
Defend
Point
Natural
Understand
Nature
Enough

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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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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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!
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Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising.
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The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
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Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.
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A pretty girl can do no wrong.
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Concrete is heavy iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.
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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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A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
Edward Abbey
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When I write paradise I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.
Edward Abbey
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Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
Edward Abbey
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The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.
Edward Abbey
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I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.
Edward Abbey
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In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.
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Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.
Edward Abbey
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All living things on earth are kindred.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn sight better.
Edward Abbey
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Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly it's the highway that is ugly.
Edward Abbey
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King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.
Edward Abbey