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Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be -- a man.
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
Difficult
Find
Enough
Dreamed
Great
Finally
Good
Later
Men
Honor
Time
Becoming
Upon
More quotes by Edward Abbey
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
Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
Edward Abbey
Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.
Edward Abbey
Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.
Edward Abbey
I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
Edward Abbey
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
King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.
Edward Abbey
Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
Edward Abbey
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead symmetrical but stiff.
Edward Abbey
Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
Edward Abbey
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
Edward Abbey
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
Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.
Edward Abbey
Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.
Edward Abbey
Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.
Edward Abbey
Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
Edward Abbey
What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?
Edward Abbey
How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.
Edward Abbey
The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.
Edward Abbey
The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.
Edward Abbey