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A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.

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
Ruler
Behinds
Whips
Behind
Rulers
Example
Club
Leader
Clubs
Fear
Leads
Means
Fronts
Pushes
Power
Whip
Mean
Front

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.
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We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.
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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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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.
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If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.
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Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.
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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Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.
Edward Abbey
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It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.
Edward Abbey
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Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly it's the highway that is ugly.
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High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring
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For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.
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Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.
Edward Abbey
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I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.
Edward Abbey
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Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him he harms nobody and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
Edward Abbey
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Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.
Edward Abbey
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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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There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.
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Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)
Edward Abbey
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I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
Edward Abbey