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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
Men
Disaster
Banal
Accounts
Levers
Machines
Imperial
Committed
Disasters
Crime
Recorded
History
Crimes
Littles
Largely
Little
Account

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Simplicity is always a virtue.
Edward Abbey
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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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There are no vacant lots in nature.
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The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.
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If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
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I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.
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Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.
Edward Abbey
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Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.
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In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)
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Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.
Edward Abbey
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The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.
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Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
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Guns don't kill people people kill people. Of course, people with guns kill more people. But that's only natural. It's hard. But it's fair.
Edward Abbey
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A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.
Edward Abbey
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I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.
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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Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?
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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We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
Edward Abbey
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A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.
Edward Abbey