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All governments require enemy governments.

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
Governments
Enemy
Government
Require

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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How can I be so evil? It ain't easy.
Edward Abbey
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Concrete is heavy iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.
Edward Abbey
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Salome had but seven veils the artist has a thousand.
Edward Abbey
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A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.
Edward Abbey
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I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
Edward Abbey
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Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.
Edward Abbey
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If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dream.
Edward Abbey
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May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
Edward Abbey
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If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
Edward Abbey
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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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From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.
Edward Abbey
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I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.
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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A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.
Edward Abbey
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Little boys love machines girls adore horses grown-up men and women like to walk.
Edward Abbey
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There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.
Edward Abbey
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Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
Edward Abbey
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Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.
Edward Abbey