Quote

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

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
Write
Console
Found
Pleasing
Others
Provoking
Writing
Challenge
Always
Approach
People
Please
Infuriate
Second
Soothe
Challenges
Provoke

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Grown men do not need leaders.
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I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.
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The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.
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If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.
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Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
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The industrial corporation is the natural enemy of nature.
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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.
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In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.
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My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.
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Music is a savage art, a measured madness.
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There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.
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The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.
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I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
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Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.
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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.
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Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?
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The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.
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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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I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.
Edward Abbey
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All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?
Edward Abbey