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Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

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
Away
Powers
Good
Foreign
Critics
Sea
Hack
Beyond
Hacks
Writer
Rail
Society
Safely
Lives
Critic

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
Edward Abbey
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I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.
Edward Abbey
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A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.
Edward Abbey
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The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.
Edward Abbey
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If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dream.
Edward Abbey
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A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.
Edward Abbey
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But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.
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.
Edward Abbey
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My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: 'Yeah,' she said, 'I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn.'
Edward Abbey
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We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?
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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I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.
Edward Abbey
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The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.
Edward Abbey
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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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We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
Edward Abbey
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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
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Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.
Edward Abbey
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Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking namely, life.
Edward Abbey
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The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
Edward Abbey
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Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?
Edward Abbey