"If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult . . . I apologize."
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Quote collection
Edward Abbey quotes (page 13 of 33)
653 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Taxation: how the sheep are shorn."
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"Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary."
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"Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure."
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"We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal."
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"The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war; for nationalism; identification with something bigger than the self."
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"The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness."
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"Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places."
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"In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe."
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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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"Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country."
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"One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill."
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"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, "thus far and no further." If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, "If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."
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"A good writer must have more than vin rosé in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink."
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"Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris."
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"I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism."
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"Our “neoconservatives” are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell."
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"England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country."
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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."
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"We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope."
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