Quote

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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Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Least
Time
State
Transfigures
Seems
Transforms
Power
Omnipotent
States
Defiance
Personality
Human
Perhaps
Humans
Single
Enough

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.
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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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The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.
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When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.
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We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.
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No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn sight better.
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The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
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Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead symmetrical but stiff.
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The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war.
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I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
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My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: 'Yeah,' she said, 'I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn.'
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Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
Edward Abbey
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I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.
Edward Abbey
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There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.
Edward Abbey
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One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
Edward Abbey
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All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
Edward Abbey
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A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.
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Books are like eggs -- best when fresh.
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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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