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When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.

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
Situation
Playful
Desperate
Late
Serious

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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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
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Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote _The Golden Ass_.
Edward Abbey
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An empty man is full of himself.
Edward Abbey
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In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.
Edward Abbey
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There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
Edward Abbey
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Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.
Edward Abbey
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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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Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.
Edward Abbey
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Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.
Edward Abbey
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Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.
Edward Abbey
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Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.
Edward Abbey
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My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward Abbey
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Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
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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Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.
Edward Abbey
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Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.
Edward Abbey
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Our “neoconservatives” are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.
Edward Abbey
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Concrete is heavy iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.
Edward Abbey
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Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.
Edward Abbey
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It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?
Edward Abbey