"Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind."
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Quote collection
Edward Abbey quotes (page 8 of 33)
653 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Life is already too short to waste on speed."
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"I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?"
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"All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour."
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"Grown men do not need leaders."
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"Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination."
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"I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal."
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"I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore."
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"Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront."
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"I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent."
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"Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either."
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"All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly."
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"There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary."
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"We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope."
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"The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live."
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"We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here."
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"There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed."
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"There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure."
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"Anarchism is democracy taken seriously."
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"In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert."
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