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Without courage, all other virtues are useless.

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
Courage
Virtue
Without
Morose
Virtues
Useless

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.
Edward Abbey
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In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.
Edward Abbey
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I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.
Edward Abbey
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Little boys love machines girls adore horses grown-up men and women like to walk.
Edward Abbey
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The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.
Edward Abbey
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We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races -- by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.
Edward Abbey
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Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
Edward Abbey
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Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.
Edward Abbey
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I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
Edward Abbey
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Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.
Edward Abbey
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A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.
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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A good writer must have more than vin rosé in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.
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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Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.
Edward Abbey
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My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.
Edward Abbey
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Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
Edward Abbey
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The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.
Edward Abbey