Quote

Our contemporary Tories prefer the term 'ordered liberty' to 'freedom'. The word 'freedom' scares them it has too much of a paleolithic ring to 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
Term
Scares
Word
Ordered
Freedom
Ring
Much
Scare
Rings
Contemporary
Prefer
Paleolithic
Liberty
Tories

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Every important change in our society, for the good, at least, has taken place because of popular pressure-pressure from below, from the great mass of people.
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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.
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Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.
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There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.
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Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.
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The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.
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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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Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
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You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
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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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Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.
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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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The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.
Edward Abbey
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If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.
Edward Abbey
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In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)
Edward Abbey
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One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
Edward Abbey
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The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)
Edward Abbey
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In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.
Edward Abbey
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Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables
Edward Abbey
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It is not enough to understand the natural world the point is to defend and preserve it.
Edward Abbey