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

More quotes by 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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To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?
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We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?
Edward Abbey
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My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.
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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What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
Edward Abbey
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Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him he harms nobody and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
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All living things on earth are kindred.
Edward Abbey
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Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature they distort it.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Only the half-mad are wholly alive.
Edward Abbey
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Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.
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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A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.
Edward Abbey
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The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.
Edward Abbey
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I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.
Edward Abbey
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One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.
Edward Abbey
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It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.
Edward Abbey
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What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.
Edward Abbey
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There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.
Edward Abbey