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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

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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
Others
Coerce
Power
Described
Mean
Ideal
Men
Ideals
Simply
Quite
Society
Means

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Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)
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There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.
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Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.
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We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.
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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.
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In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.
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The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.
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The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.
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Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game
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The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
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One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.
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I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
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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.
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I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.
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It is not enough to understand the natural world the point is to defend and preserve it.
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Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
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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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I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.
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Music is a savage art, a measured madness.
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Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Edward Abbey