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Every important change in our society, for the good, at least, has taken place because of popular pressure-pressure from below, from the great mass of people.

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
Great
Pressure
Every
Mass
Good
Least
People
Taken
Society
Place
Change
Advocacy
Important
Popular

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A pretty girl can do no wrong.
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In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.
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Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives reclining. They can't quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position.
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Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking namely, life.
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When I write paradise I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.
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The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone - and to no one.
Edward Abbey
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I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.
Edward Abbey
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The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
Edward Abbey
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When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
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Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.
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The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.
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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What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.
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 only thing left worth saving is wilderness.
Edward Abbey
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The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Edward Abbey
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The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.
Edward Abbey
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When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
Edward Abbey