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Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

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
Likely
Thinking
Alike
Pretend

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Beware of the man who has no enemies.
Edward Abbey
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Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables
Edward Abbey
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In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.
Edward Abbey
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If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.
Edward Abbey
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Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
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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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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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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Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
Edward Abbey
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Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.
Edward Abbey
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I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.
Edward Abbey
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To be alive is to take risks to be always safe and secure is death.
Edward Abbey
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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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The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.
Edward Abbey
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Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
Edward Abbey
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I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.
Edward Abbey