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There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

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
Worthy
Humans
Ideals
Never
Remains
Civilization
Name
Names
Remote
Society
Ideal
Human

More quotes by 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.
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Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.
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Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps, or a hand grenade, if handy, or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface.
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This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.
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The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.
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A world without open country would be universal jail.
Edward Abbey
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It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
Edward Abbey
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What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.
Edward Abbey
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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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The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.
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
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Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.
Edward Abbey
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The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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I wish to be an inspector of volcanoes. I want to study cloud formations and memorize the wind and learn by heart the habits of the ponderosa pine.
Edward Abbey
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Generally speaking, it's a matter of only mild intellectual interest to me whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth. In fact, I don't care a rat's ass either way.
Edward Abbey
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An empty man is full of himself.
Edward Abbey
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Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it.
Edward Abbey
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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.
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