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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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Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Accounts
Levers
Machines
Imperial
Committed
Disasters
Crime
Recorded
History
Crimes
Littles
Largely
Little
Account
Men
Disaster
Banal

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The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.
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King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.
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How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.
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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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The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.
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The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.
Edward Abbey
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A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.
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By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.
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When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.
Edward Abbey
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The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.
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Love flowers best in openness and freedom.
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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.
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Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.
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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.
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Appearance versus reality? Appearance is reality, God damn it!
Edward Abbey
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I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.
Edward Abbey
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Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
Edward Abbey
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If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.
Edward Abbey
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I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.
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.
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