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Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

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
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More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
Edward Abbey
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What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
Edward Abbey
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The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
Edward Abbey
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Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
Edward Abbey
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Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.
Edward Abbey
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A pretty girl can do no wrong.
Edward Abbey
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I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.
Edward Abbey
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We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.
Edward Abbey
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Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.
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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My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.
Edward Abbey
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Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.
Edward Abbey
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The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.
Edward Abbey
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Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
Edward Abbey
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Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
Edward Abbey
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The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war for nationalism identification with something bigger than the self.
Edward Abbey
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A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
Edward Abbey
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The sense of justice springs from self-respect both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them.
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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Appearance versus reality? Appearance is reality, God damn it!
Edward Abbey