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A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.

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
Herds
Farmer
Rancher
Lands
Mowers
Farms
Ranchers
Farmers
Legged
Land
Lawn
Public
Herd
Four
Lawns

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Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.
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One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.
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Life: another day, another dolor.
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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.
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James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.
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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.
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It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.
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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.
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Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.
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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 loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.
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I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.
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Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly it's the highway that is ugly.
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Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
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Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?
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Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.
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Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.
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The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.
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Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
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The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.
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