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Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

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
Wisdom
Call
Proverbs
Often
Expedient
Kind
Folk
Thinking
Stupidity
Folks
Save
Trouble

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
Edward Abbey
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I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.
Edward Abbey
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Great art is never perfect perfect art is never great.
Edward Abbey
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Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.
Edward Abbey
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Be a half-assed crusader, a part-time fanatic. Don't worry to much about the fate of the world. Saving the world is only a hobby. Get out there and enjoy the world, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, husbands wives climb mountains, run rivers, get drunk, do whatever you want to do while you can, before it's too late.
Edward Abbey
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A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.
Edward Abbey
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What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
Edward Abbey
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Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.
Edward Abbey
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Simplicity is always a virtue.
Edward Abbey
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Grown men do not need leaders.
Edward Abbey
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Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
Edward Abbey
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I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
Edward Abbey
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I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.
Edward Abbey
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Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.
Edward Abbey
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Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.
Edward Abbey
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Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.
Edward Abbey
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The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe.
Edward Abbey
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And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.
Edward Abbey
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Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.
Edward Abbey
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A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.
Edward Abbey