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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A world without open country would be universal jail.
Edward Abbey
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And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.
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Running the big rapids is like sex: half the fun lies in the anticipation. Two thirds of the thrill with the approach. The remainder is only ecstasy-or darkness.
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It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.
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I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.
Edward Abbey
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By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.
Edward Abbey
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An empty man is full of himself.
Edward Abbey
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There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.
Edward Abbey
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What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.
Edward Abbey
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Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement—mating season.
Edward Abbey
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Be a half-assed crusader, a part-time fanatic. Don't worry to much about the fate of the world. Saving the world is only a hobby. Get out there and enjoy the world, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, husbands wives climb mountains, run rivers, get drunk, do whatever you want to do while you can, before it's too late.
Edward Abbey
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Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.
Edward Abbey
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In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
Edward Abbey
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It may be true that my desk here is really 'nothing but' a transient eddy of electrons in the flux of universal process. Nevertheless, I find that it continues to support my feet, my revolver, and my cigars all day long. What happens when my back is turned I don't know. Or much care. That's no concern of mine.
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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The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
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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Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.
Edward Abbey