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Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature they distort 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
Bigs
Social
Nature
Human
Humans
Distort
Reflect
Institutions

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The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.
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A world without open country would be universal jail.
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Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking namely, life.
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Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.
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One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
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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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The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
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Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
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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The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.
Edward Abbey
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The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.
Edward Abbey
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Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
Edward Abbey
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One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information (2) coherent knowledge (3) deep understanding (4) infinite loving wisdom (5) no more kidney stones, please.
Edward Abbey
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In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.
Edward Abbey
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Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
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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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.
Edward Abbey
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We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
Edward Abbey
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Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?
Edward Abbey
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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