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Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.

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
Necessary
Word
Freedom
Free
Humans
Became

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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A world without open country would be universal jail.
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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One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
Edward Abbey
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Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.
Edward Abbey
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A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.
Edward Abbey
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Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.
Edward Abbey
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In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.
Edward Abbey
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Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.
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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Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.
Edward Abbey
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All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.
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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We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
Edward Abbey
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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.
Edward Abbey
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We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.
Edward Abbey
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We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
Edward Abbey
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All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
Edward Abbey
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The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.
Edward Abbey
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Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
Edward Abbey
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Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.
Edward Abbey