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Aaliyah [Haughton] (19792001), R&B singer, actress
I want people to remember me as a full on entertainer and a good person.
Aaliyah
It's hard to say what I want my legacy to be when I'm long gone.
Aaliyah
Keep working hard and you can get anything that you want. If God gave you the talent, you should go for it.
But don't think it's going to be easy. It's hard!
Aaliyah
More on
Hank [Henry Louis] Aaron (1934 ), Hall of Fame baseball player
Can I smoke now without someone taking my picture?
Hank Aaron
Didn't come up here to read. Came up here to hit.
Hank Aaron
Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is eighty percent of being a successful hitter. The other twenty
percent is just execution.
Hank Aaron
I can't recall a day this year or last when I did not hear the name of Babe Ruth.
Hank Aaron
I don't see pitches down the middle anymore not even in batting practice.
Hank Aaron
I don't want them to forget Ruth, I just want them to remember me!
Hank Aaron
I looked for the same pitch my whole career, a breaking ball. All of the time. I never worried about the fastball.
They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.
Hank Aaron
I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you're inferior, it makes you wonder if the other
guys have something you've never seen before. If they do, I'm still looking for it.
Hank Aaron (1992)
I never smile when I have a bat in my hands. That's when you've got to be serious. When I get out on the field,
nothing's a joke to me. I don't feel like I should walk around with a smile on my face.
Hank Aaron
I'm hoping someday that some kid, black or white, will hit more home runs than myself. Whoever it is, I'd be
pulling for him.
Hank Aaron
It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the
golf course.
Hank Aaron
Last year, I was sort of a kid and I was a little scared, I ain't scared any more.
Hank Aaron
My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble
off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.
Hank Aaron
On the field, blacks have been able to be super giants. But, once our playing days are over, this is the end of it
and we go back to the back of the bus again.
Hank Aaron
Roger Maris lost his hair the season he hit sixty-one, I still have all my hair, but when it's over, I'm going home
to Mobile and fish for a long time.
Hank Aaron
The pitcher has got only a ball. I've got a bat. So the percentage in weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow
with the ball do the fretting.
Hank Aaron
The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood
why fans are so obsessed with them.
Hank Aaron
You can only milk a cow so long, then you're left holding the pail.
Hank Aaron
You got to play a hundred and fifty games a year, so pick your spots. You can miss two games a month; so
pick the days you're gonna be hurt, or you're gonna rest or you're gonna have a drink or two. The rest of the
time, be on that field.
Hank Aaron
More on
Edward Abbey
(19271989), American essayist, novelist, atheist, anarchist and militant conservationist
A city man is at home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he
belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.
Edward Abbey
A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.
Edward Abbey
A man without a horse is like a man without a weapon: stunted and naked.
Edward Abbey
A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.
Edward Abbey
A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.
Edward Abbey
A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
Edward Abbey
A formal education can sometimes be broadening but more often merely flattens.
Edward Abbey
A genius is always on duty; even his dreams are tax deductible.
Edward Abbey
A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.
Edward Abbey
A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.
Edward Abbey
A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.
Edward Abbey
A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club,
the whip, the power of fear.
Edward Abbey
A life without tragedy would not be worth living.
Edward Abbey
A Mahler symphony is full of surprises but each surprise, on second hearing, turns out to be an
inevitable surprise.
Edward Abbey
A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.
Edward Abbey
A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.
Edward Abbey
A man's duty? To be ready with rifle or rood to defend his home when the showdown comes.
Edward Abbey
A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.
Edward Abbey
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Edward Abbey
A pretty girl can do no wrong.
Edward Abbey
A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
Edward Abbey
A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and
The Last Whole Earth Catalog.
Edward Abbey
A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist.
Edward Abbey
A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government,
opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
Edward Abbey
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.
Edward Abbey
Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity:
form of rape by the State.
Edward Abbey
According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually
nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points
oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum." I'll have to think
about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate
the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces.
Edward Abbey
Ah, to be a buzzard now that spring is here!
Edward Abbey
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.
Edward Abbey
Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate;
and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly
diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.
Edward Abbey
All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.
Edward Abbey
All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
Edward Abbey
All gold is fool's gold.
Edward Abbey
All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?
Edward Abbey
All governments require enemy governments.
Edward Abbey
All is One? But One is so Many!
Edward Abbey
All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.
Edward Abbey
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.
Edward Abbey
All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love and most of all, an audience!
Edward Abbey
America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of
all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.
Edward Abbey
Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for "To
hell with our children."
Edward Abbey
An empty man is full of himself.
Edward Abbey
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to
rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
Edward Abbey
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on
five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our
lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
Edward Abbey
Anarchy works. Italy has proved it for a thousand years.
Edward Abbey
Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times (ten, actually), trying to get it just right. He failed.
Edward Abbey
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.
Edward Abbey
Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.
Edward Abbey
Appearance "versus" reality? Appearance "is" reality, God damn it!
Edward Abbey
Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote The Golden Ass.
Edward Abbey
Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view
of some people.
Edward Abbey
Art, science, philosophy, religion each offers at best only a crude
simplification of actual living experience.
Edward Abbey
As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only
antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I
suffer also from sloth.
Edward Abbey
As between the skulking and furtive poacher, who hunts for the sake of meat,
and the honest gentleman shooter, who kills for the pleasure of sport, I find
the former a higher type of humanity.
Edward Abbey
As Mark Twain said, "I love Wagner if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!"
Edward Abbey
As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.
Edward Abbey
Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions,
offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the
situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game.
Edward Abbey
Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is
equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.
Edward Abbey
"Be fair," say the temporizers, "tell both sides of the story." But how can
you be fair to both sides of a rape? Of a murder? Of a massacre?
Edward Abbey
Be it ever so vile, there's no place like home.
Edward Abbey
Be of good cheer: We'll live to piss on the graves of our enemies.
Edward Abbey
Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.
Edward Abbey
Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.
Edward Abbey
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
Edward Abbey
Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the
rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses ...
Edward Abbey
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
Edward Abbey
Beware of the man who has no enemies.
Edward Abbey
Beware the writer who always encloses the word reality in quotation
marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
Edward Abbey
Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.
Edward Abbey
Books are like eggs best when fresh.
Edward Abbey
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to
provide the food of reflection for a century.
Edward Abbey
By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.
Edward Abbey
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
Edward Abbey
Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.
Edward Abbey
Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.
Edward Abbey
Cheer up, comrades: You can't feel as bad as you look. Or look as bad as you feel.
Edward Abbey
Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.
Edward Abbey
Cities should be like the county fairgrounds: empty places except during times of festival and tournament.
Edward Abbey
Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.
Edward Abbey
Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube: There are some
things one would rather have done than do.
Edward Abbey
Cold morning on Aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, build fire in old stove.
Second, start coffee. Then, heat up last night's pork chops and spinach for
breakfast. Why not? And why the hell not?
Edward Abbey
Concrete is heavy; iron is hard but the grass will prevail.
Edward Abbey
Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always
groveling before the rich and the powerful.
Edward Abbey
Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow.
Edward Abbey
Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.
Edward Abbey
Crossing the bar: "I want to buy a beer for every man in the house. If any."
Edward Abbey
Daddy, the garbage man is here! Tell him we don't need any.
Edward Abbey
Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.
Edward Abbey
Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or
overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.
Edward Abbey
Democracy rule by the people sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.
Edward Abbey
Desire lends strength. Aspiration creates inspiration, which, for the artist,
is the breath of life.
Edward Abbey
Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?
Edward Abbey
Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.
Edward Abbey
Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more
than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he
lived in. (See, for example, A Piece of My Mind; The Cold War and the
Income Tax; the introduction to Patriotic Gore.) Our conventional
critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.
Edward Abbey
England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's
wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.
Edward Abbey
Epitaphs for a gravestone: "Please: no hooliganism"; or "Es prohibe se hace
agua aqui"; or "No comment".
Edward Abbey
Every analysis leaves a residue of the unknown; this we call God or Karma or
depending on time and place the UFO. (Unidentified Fucking Object).
Edward Abbey
Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.
Edward Abbey
Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.
Edward Abbey
Every moment is precious. And precarious.
Edward Abbey
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast
literati those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
Edward Abbey
Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.
Edward Abbey
Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's
an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.
Edward Abbey
Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt
on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor
camp, the psychiatric ward.
Edward Abbey
Farting is such sweet sorrow.
Edward Abbey
Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a
comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side
of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.
Edward Abbey
Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal
anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.
Edward Abbey
Fire lookout, 1400 hours, ferocious lightning storm. Me and God. That fucker
is trying to get me again, God damn him. But I got me old .357 ...
Edward Abbey
Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are retarded gorillas wearing
helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the
gorillas on.
Edward Abbey
For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good
enough.
Edward Abbey
For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.
Edward Abbey
Free love is priced right.
Edward Abbey
Freedom begins between the ears.
Edward Abbey
From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
Edward Abbey
Generally speaking, it's a matter of only mild intellectual interest to me
whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth. In fact,
I don't care a rat's ass either way.
Edward Abbey
Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.
Edward Abbey
Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.
Edward Abbey
God bless America. Let's save some of it.
Edward Abbey
God is love? Not bloody likely.
Edward Abbey
Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or
Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have
done.
Edward Abbey
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one
should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.
Edward Abbey
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
Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.
Edward Abbey
Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
Edward Abbey
Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.
Edward Abbey
Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.
Edward Abbey
Grown men do not need leaders.
Edward Abbey
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey
"Have a nice day," said Lady Macbeth.
Edward Abbey
Henry James: our finest lady novelist.
Edward Abbey
Henry James was our master of periphrasis the fine art of saying as little
as possible in the greatest number of words.
Edward Abbey
High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and
primordial tasks chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring ...
Edward Abbey
Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.
Edward Abbey
Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.
Edward Abbey
Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and
stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.
Edward Abbey
How can I be so evil? It ain't easy.
Edward Abbey
How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect
formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
Edward Abbey
How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.
Edward Abbey
How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup
during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.
Edward Abbey
How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own
cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
Edward Abbey
Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with
the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.
Edward Abbey
Humility is a virtue when you have no other.
Edward Abbey
I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain
inescapable obligations to world literature.
Edward Abbey
I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
Edward Abbey
I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?
Edward Abbey
I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York,
Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.
Edward Abbey
I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not
realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
Edward Abbey
I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace ... The rest is only hearsay.
Edward Abbey
I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left
that is worth saving.
Edward Abbey
I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me
one man who deserves to live forever.
Edward Abbey
I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children
to adults, animals to humans ... And rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.
Edward Abbey
I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words "phenomenology" or
"structuralism," I reach for my buck knife.
Edward Abbey
I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.
Edward Abbey
I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress.
Edward Abbey
I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
Edward Abbey
I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life if I live that long.
Edward Abbey
I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the
swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.
Edward Abbey
I like the smell of oil, grease, gasoline and gunfire.
Edward Abbey
I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?
Edward Abbey
I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.
Edward Abbey
I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help
an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.
Edward Abbey
I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.
Edward Abbey
I wouldn't trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made unless I
could trade the Rolls for two good horses.
Edward Abbey
I'd rather kill a man than a snake. Not because I love snakes or hate men. It
is a question, rather, of proportion.
Edward Abbey
If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then
the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.
Edward Abbey
If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth
making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.
Edward Abbey
If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns.
Edward Abbey
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture that is
immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
Edward Abbey
If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from
time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.
Edward Abbey
If the end does not justify the means what can?
Edward Abbey
If the world is irrational, we can never know it either it or its irrationality.
Edward Abbey
If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.
Edward Abbey
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
If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
Edward Abbey
If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully as you
choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.
Edward Abbey
If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you
complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.
Edward Abbey
If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at
dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.
Edward Abbey
I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.
Edward Abbey
I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal.
Edward Abbey
In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
Edward Abbey
In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the
food.
Edward Abbey
In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.
Edward Abbey
In art as in a boat, a bullet, or a coconut-cream pie, purpose determines form.
Edward Abbey
In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.
Edward Abbey
In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.
Edward Abbey
In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.
Edward Abbey
In history-as-politics, the "future" is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of
statesmen.
Edward Abbey
In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.
Edward Abbey
In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who
spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.
Edward Abbey
In my case, saving the world was only a hobby.
Edward Abbey
In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.
Edward Abbey
In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military-industrial civilization will soon collapse.
Edward Abbey
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
In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rocks.
Edward Abbey
In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.
Edward Abbey
In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share
the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.
Edward Abbey
In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from
infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.
Edward Abbey
In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political especially that which pretends not to be.
Edward Abbey
In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is
the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.
Edward Abbey
In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.
Edward Abbey
In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.
Edward Abbey
Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such
feeble passions as generating anything.
Edward Abbey
Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the basic tyrant of the modern age.
Edward Abbey
Is a mirage real? Well, it's a real mirage.
Edward Abbey
Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so.
Edward Abbey
Is the Archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with
bigger things than us on their minds.
Edward Abbey
Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?
Edward Abbey
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
Edward Abbey
It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak
truth to power, who will?
Edward Abbey
It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.
Edward Abbey
It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.
Edward Abbey
It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if
necessary, subversive.
Edward Abbey
It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.
Edward Abbey
It is time for us men to acknowledge not only that women are vastly superior beings (that's easy) but also
that they are in every way that matters our equals. That's hard.
Edward Abbey
It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events
took place after the fiction was written.
Edward Abbey
It may be true that my desk here is really "nothing but" a transient eddy of electrons in the flux of
universal process. Nevertheless, I find that it continues to support my feet, my revolver, and my cigars all day
long. What happens when my back is turned I don't know. Or much care. That's no concern of mine.
Edward Abbey
It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find
many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.
Edward Abbey
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
It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.
Edward Abbey
I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.
Edward Abbey
I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer
the pangs of about seventeen regrets the seventeen who got away.
Edward Abbey
J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty you can always tell a shithead by that
initial initial.
Edward Abbey
Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and
died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
Edward Abbey
James Joyce buried himself in his great work. Finnegan's Wake is his
monument and his tombstone. A dead end.
Edward Abbey
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver.
Something vital is lacking; namely, life.
Edward Abbey
Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak.
Edward Abbey
John Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted
his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer
can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest living author: Hold a chilled
mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing like a faery breath! upon
the glass.
Edward Abbey
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody;
and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
Edward Abbey
Life: another day, another dolor.
Edward Abbey
Life imitates art but badly.
Edward Abbey
Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.
Edward Abbey
Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.
Edward Abbey
Life is unfair. And it's not fair that life is unfair.
Edward Abbey
Life without music would be an intolerable insult.
Edward Abbey
Lifting her skirt, she revealed her treasure. The mother lode. Pretty, I thought, but is it art?
Edward Abbey
Like any writer, I'd rather be read than dead. Like any serious
author, I'd rather be dead than not read at all.
Edward Abbey
Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the
same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.
Edward Abbey
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A
healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies
for Nabisco.
Edward Abbey
Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.
Edward Abbey
Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of
genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.
Edward Abbey
Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
Edward Abbey
King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot.
Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark
Twain was a great writer.
Edward Abbey
Koan: Why "did" the chicken cross the road?
Edward Abbey
Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend
their liberties.
Edward Abbey
Life is cruel? Compared to what?
Edward Abbey
Life is hard? True but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.
Edward Abbey
Life without music would be an intolerable insult.
Edward Abbey
Man was created to complete the horse.
Edward Abbey
Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat planet Earth could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty
book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama
soap opera with literary trimmings.
Edward Abbey
Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as
deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Edward Abbey
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
Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand:
Man is not a lovable animal.
Edward Abbey
Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to
die for it. And to kill for it.
Edward Abbey
Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.
Edward Abbey
Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.
Edward Abbey
Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.
Edward Abbey
Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
Edward Abbey
Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love
of power. And love of power is the root of evil.
Edward Abbey
Mormonism: Nothing so hilarious could possibly be true. Or all bad.
Edward Abbey
Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.
Edward Abbey
Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.
Edward Abbey
Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.
Edward Abbey
Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for
peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.
Edward Abbey
Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a
wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.
Edward Abbey
Most writers are naturally sycophants. Born in the fetal position, they never learn to stand erect.
Edward Abbey
Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not
wish to be mothers should not have babies.
Edward Abbey
Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In
his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.
Edward Abbey
Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If
there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.
Edward Abbey
Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
Edward Abbey
Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are
unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the
power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today
as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the
archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.
Edward Abbey
Music is a savage art, a measured madness.
Edward Abbey
My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: "Yeah," she said, "I'll be dead pretty soon. And
frankly, I don't give a damn."
Edward Abbey
My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and
Hanksville, Utah.
Edward Abbey
My books are not taken seriously. But that's all right; they are given
playfully.
Edward Abbey
My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more
computers.
Edward Abbey
My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on
the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.
Edward Abbey
My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog
story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward Abbey
My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been
written yet.
Edward Abbey
My Publisher: "Yes, sooner or later, we all wake up dead!"
Edward Abbey
My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut
in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink
into meditation, contemplating my novel.
Edward Abbey
Narrow-minded provincialism: Sad to say but true I am more interested in the mountain lions of
Utah, the wild pigs of Arizona, than I am in the fate of all the Arabs of Araby, all the Wogs of Hindustan,
all the Ethiopes of Abyssinia ...
Edward Abbey
Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.
Edward Abbey
Nature, like Miamonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.
Edward Abbey
Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of
torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.
Edward Abbey
Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man called Doc.
Never make love to a woman called Mizz *La Belle Dame*.
Edward Abbey
New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can
survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?
Edward Abbey
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.
Edward Abbey
No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.
Edward Abbey
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by
so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page,
Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
Edward Abbey
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of
policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
Edward Abbey
Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.
Edward Abbey
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly,
New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an
honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot
juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
Edward Abbey
Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick
education in the basis of industrial society.
Edward Abbey
Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the
latest pronouncements of science.
Edward Abbey
Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's
newspaper.
Edward Abbey
Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.
Edward Abbey
Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now,
finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be a man.
Edward Abbey
One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than
the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living
experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.
Edward Abbey
One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's
plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.
Edward Abbey
One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information;
(2) coherent knowledge; (3) deep understanding; (4) infinite loving wisdom; (5) no more kidney stones,
please.
Edward Abbey
One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is
getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
Edward Abbey
One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers.
Edward Abbey
One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
Edward Abbey
Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.
Edward Abbey
Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give
the science of optics the last word on the matter.
Edward Abbey
Only the half-mad are wholly alive.
Edward Abbey
Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling
tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)
Edward Abbey
Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the
heart.
Edward Abbey
Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.
Edward Abbey
Our contemporary Tories prefer the term "ordered liberty" to quot;freedom". The
word "freedom" scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.
Edward Abbey
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.
Edward Abbey
Our "neoconservatives" are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon
and evil as Hell.
Edward Abbey
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
Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature.
Edward Abbey
Perfection is a minor virtue.
Edward Abbey
Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful
wasteland.
Edward Abbey
Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly
affirms.
Edward Abbey
Poetry even bad poetry may be our final hope.
Edward Abbey
Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too
radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the
musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called
"March of the Soviet Police."
Edward Abbey
Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
Edward Abbey
Preacher to me: "A dollar for the Lord, brother?" Me to preacher: "That's all right,
I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him."
Edward Abbey
Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall
had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles ...
Edward Abbey
Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often
no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
Edward Abbey
Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein
and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same
world.
Edward Abbey
Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural
explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a
cyclotron during a dark night in February.
Edward Abbey
Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.
Edward Abbey
Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child
of human history.
Edward Abbey
Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed
by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
Edward Abbey
Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the
Nutcracker Suite?
Edward Abbey
Remembrance of Things Past: an enormous fruitcake laced with cyanide.
Edward Abbey
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
"Rock" is the music of slaves. Of adolescents pursuing the illusion of freedom and protest while the
steel chains of technology bind them ever tighter.
Edward Abbey
"Rock": music to hammer out fenders by. Music for vomiting to after a hard day spreading asphalt.
Vietnam music. Imitation-Afro, industrial air-compressor music.
Edward Abbey
Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets,
have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.
Edward Abbey
Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible,
especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.
Edward Abbey
Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of
nature.
Edward Abbey
Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.
Edward Abbey
Saving the world was merely a hobby. My vocation has been that of
inspector of desert water holes.
Edward Abbey
"Say what you like about my bloody murderous government," I says, "but don't
insult me poor bleedin' country."
Edward Abbey
Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.
Edward Abbey
Science transcends mere politics. As recent history demonstrates, scientists
are as willing to work for a Tojo, a Hitler, or a Stalin as for the free nations
of the West.
Edward Abbey
Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.
Edward Abbey
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a
thousand books.
Edward Abbey
Sex is not compulsory, reply the fetus lovers. True: but we're not talking
about sex we're talking about maternity.
Edward Abbey
Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for
example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of
Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?
Edward Abbey
Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen
Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance
projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus
laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.
Edward Abbey
Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of
scum on top.
Edward Abbey
Spartacus, like Jesus, was also crucified by the Romans. And for equally good
reasons.
Edward Abbey
Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.
Edward Abbey
Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red
coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did
figure out who won that war.
Edward Abbey
South of the border: The Hispanics despise the mestizos, the mestizos look
with contempt on *Los Indios*, the Indians take it out on their women and
dogs.
Edward Abbey
Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov
or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of
technique.
Edward Abbey
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
Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it.
Edward Abbey
Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up
to be a Frenchman.
Edward Abbey
Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.
Edward Abbey
Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses they tie who cares? And
why?
Edward Abbey
Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against
its own people.
Edward Abbey
That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information,
and less and less understanding.
Edward Abbey
The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.
Edward Abbey
The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.
Edward Abbey
The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.
Edward Abbey
The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.
Edward Abbey
The basic question is this: Why should anything exist? Nothing
would be tidier.
Edward Abbey
The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology the study of
life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.
Edward Abbey
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London,
Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
Edward Abbey
The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that
music, one can believe anything while the music lasts.
Edward Abbey
The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.
Edward Abbey
The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.
Edward Abbey
The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had
time to sit on a log and read a good book.
Edward Abbey
The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.
Edward Abbey
The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are
wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.
Edward Abbey
The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we
executed a few innocent people more often.
Edward Abbey
The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.
Edward Abbey
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
Edward Abbey
The dog's life is a good life, for a dog.
Edward Abbey
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
Edward Abbey
The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will
be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe.
Edward Abbey
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Edward Abbey
The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men
to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do
not yet have a name.
Edward Abbey
The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.
Edward Abbey
The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North Star, to serve as a guiding point.
Edward Abbey
The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.
Edward Abbey
The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.
Edward Abbey
The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.
Edward Abbey
The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.
Edward Abbey
The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this
little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
Edward Abbey
The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.
Edward Abbey
The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
Edward Abbey
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has
the power of means to coerce others.
Edward Abbey
The industrial corporation is the natural enemy of nature.
Edward Abbey
The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad,
from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production
of human corpses.
Edward Abbey
The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos.
But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always
performed with brilliance and elan.
Edward Abbey
The mad scientist was once only a creature of gothic romance; now he is
everywhere, busy torturing atoms and animals in his laboratory.
Edward Abbey
"The mind is everything," wrote Proust. No doubt true, when you're dead from the neck down.
Edward Abbey
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
Edward Abbey
The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.
Edward Abbey
The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.
Edward Abbey
The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by
bulldozers and chain saws.
Edward Abbey
The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their
manners and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
Edward Abbey
The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirits weak.
Edward Abbey
The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an
acorn once in a while.
Edward Abbey
The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war.
Edward Abbey
The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the
nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?
Edward Abbey
The one thing worse than a knee-pad Tory is a chickenshit liberal. The type
that can not say "shit" even when his mouth is full of it.
Edward Abbey
The plow has probably done more harm in the long run than the sword.
Edward Abbey
The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid
fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.
Edward Abbey
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
The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of
children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They
are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such
sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is
the one most grossly abused.
Edward Abbey
The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes
stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep,
poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight,
supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow shit, cheat
grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies and then
leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he
loves the West.
Edward Abbey
The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's
basic consolations.
Edward Abbey
The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a
giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From
a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded
ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers,
processors of information.
Edward Abbey
The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to
sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every
bodily orifice.
Edward Abbey
The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various,
running the gamut from "bad" to "very bad." (Is there another gamut?)
Edward Abbey
The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.
Edward Abbey
The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks,
love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
Edward Abbey
The rifle and handgun are "equalizers" the weapons of a democracy. Tanks
and bombers represent dictatorship.
Edward Abbey
The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with
an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college
to beat it out of them.
Edward Abbey
The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get
laid.
Edward Abbey
The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand
you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the
love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.
Edward Abbey
The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that
preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
Edward Abbey
The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they
die fighting each other instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Edward Abbey
The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.
Edward Abbey
The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and
awe fear and awe of the State.
Edward Abbey
The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.
Edward Abbey
The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!
Edward Abbey
The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.
Edward Abbey
The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.
Edward Abbey
The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.
Edward Abbey
The world is wide and beautiful. But almost everywhere, everywhere, the children are dying.
Edward Abbey
The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.
Edward Abbey
The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.
Edward Abbey
The writer speaks not to his audience (who wants to listen to
lectures?) but for them, expressing their thoughts and emotions through
the imaginative power of his art.
Edward Abbey
There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable
alternative; the only sensible solution.
Edward Abbey
There are only two kinds of books good books and the others. The good are
winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.
Edward Abbey
There are two kinds are art: (1) decorative, nonobjective, wallpaper art; and
(2) art with a moral purpose.
Edward Abbey
There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.
Edward Abbey
There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self-effacement is hard to distinguish from
moral cowardice.
Edward Abbey
There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave
our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last.
Edward Abbey
There has got to be a God; the world could not have become so fucked up by chance alone.
Edward Abbey
There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.
Edward Abbey
There has never been an "original" sin: each is quite banal.
Edward Abbey
There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote
ideal.
Edward Abbey
There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.
Edward Abbey
There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation.
It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino.
Edward Abbey
There is a kind of poetry in simple fact.
Edward Abbey
There is much to admire in the work of D.H. Lawrence excepting his queer, soft, gooey, and epicene prose.
Edward Abbey
There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
Edward Abbey
There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.
Edward Abbey
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
Edward Abbey
There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his
own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.
Edward Abbey
There never was a good war or a bad revolution.
Edward Abbey
There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.
Edward Abbey
There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.
Edward Abbey
There's something about winning at poker that restores my faith in the innate goodness of my fellowman.
Edward Abbey
This world may be only illusion but it's the only illusion we've got.
Edward Abbey
Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on taste usually possess no other talent.
Edward Abbey
Those who dream of the joys of living in a space colony should live in a space colony.
Edward Abbey
Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.
Edward Abbey
Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither
end.
Edward Abbey
Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in
that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.
Edward Abbey
Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word "rebellion";
the word "revolt"; the word "revolution".
Edward Abbey
Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and
inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary
instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
Edward Abbey
To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the
stupid have an answer for every question.
Edward Abbey
Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives
reclining. They can't quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even
their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position.
Edward Abbey
Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel
laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.
Edward Abbey
Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps. Or a hand grenade,
if handy. Or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly
to the surface.
Edward Abbey
Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.
Edward Abbey
Truth is merely common sense, say the naive realist. Really? Then where, precisely, is the location of a
rainbow? In the air? In the eye? In between? Or somewhere else?
Edward Abbey
Us nature mystics got to stick together.
Edward Abbey
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.
Edward Abbey
War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.
Edward Abbey
War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.
Edward Abbey
We are all ONE, say the gurus. Aye, I might agree but one WHAT?
Edward Abbey
We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races by the character of their achievement
and by their achievement of character.
Edward Abbey
We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.
Edward Abbey
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.
Edward Abbey
We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues;
without courage, the other virtues are useless.
Edward Abbey
We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around
here.
Edward Abbey
Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace a gift.
It is not worth sweating and scheming for.
Edward Abbey
We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.
Edward Abbey
"Welcome to the banquet of life," said a recent Pope, forgetting that most have to fight their way to
the table.
Edward Abbey
What are called inspirational books, like Gibran's The Prophet or Bach's Seagull, seem to have
been strained through a bowl of fish-eye tapioca.
Edward Abbey
What did Jesus say to the headwaiter at the Last Supper? "Separate checks,
please."
Edward Abbey
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the
remote.
Edward Abbey
What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud
floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?
Edward Abbey
What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.
Edward Abbey
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for
the tiny titmouse.
Edward Abbey
What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable
place than most.
Edward Abbey
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
Edward Abbey
What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money.
Edward Abbey
What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.
Edward Abbey
When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism.
Edward Abbey
When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
Edward Abbey
When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and
take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
Edward Abbey
When I hear the word "culture," I reach for my checkbook.
Edward Abbey
When riding my old Harley at ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation
firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it.
Edward Abbey
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
Edward Abbey
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. But men of intellect will believe
anything if it appeals to their ego, their vanity, their sense of self-importance.
Edward Abbey
When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.
Edward Abbey
When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
Edward Abbey
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.
Edward Abbey
Whenever I read Time or Newsweek or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But
how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?
Edward Abbey
Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the
striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.
Edward Abbey
Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.
Edward Abbey
Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very
little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.
Edward Abbey
Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the locus Dei.
Edward Abbey
Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race.
Edward Abbey
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
Why must love always be accompanied sooner or later by sorrow and pain?
Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots.
Edward Abbey
Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their
authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One
dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.
Edward Abbey
Wilderness begins in the human mind.
Edward Abbey
William Dean Howells: a rubber chicken dangling on a string.
Edward Abbey
With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.
Edward Abbey
Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.
Edward Abbey
Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.
Edward Abbey
Women who love only women may have a good point.
Edward Abbey
Writing on the wall: "Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth."
Edward Abbey
Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know
what he will produce soon: nothing but words.
Edward Abbey
You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.
Edward Abbey
You can't belay a man who's falling in love.
Edward Abbey
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
Edward Abbey
You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.
Edward Abbey
Zen: the sound of the ax chopping. Chopping logic.
Edward Abbey
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Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott (18211893), Canadian Prime Minister
I hate politics, and what are considered their appropriate methods. I hate notoriety, public meetings, public
speeches, caucuses, and everything that I know of that is apparently the necessary incident of politics except
doing public work to the best of my ability.
Sir John Abbott (June 4, 1891)
War is the science of destruction.
Sir John Abbott
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Lyman Abbott (18351922), U.S. clergyman, author
A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice but as yet
unstained.
Lyman Abbott
Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry and sin not.
Lyman Abbott
Every great sin ought to rouse a great anger. Mob law is better than no law at all. A community which rises
in its wrath to punish with misdirected anger a great wrong is in a healthier moral condition than a community
which looks upon its perpetration with apathy and unconcern.
Lyman Abbott
Every life is march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.
Lyman Abbott
I think of death as a glad awakening from this troubled sleep which we call life; as an emancipation from a
world, which, beautiful though it may be, is still a land of captivity.
Lyman Abbott
In New York whose subway trains in particular have been "tattooed" with an energy to put our
own rude practitioners to shame not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.
Lyman Abbott
It is easy to condemn, it is better to pity.
Lyman Abbott
Patience is passion tamed.
Lyman Abbott
Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new
millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called
the last gasp of the past.
Lyman Abbott
The brotherhood of man is an integral part of Christianity no less than the Fatherhood of God; and to deny
the one is no less infidel than to deny the other.
Lyman Abbott
The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our
feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.
Lyman Abbott
The highest qualities of character
must be earned.
Lyman Abbott
[The Trinity] is a corruption borrowed from the heathen religions, and ingrafted on the Christian faith.
Lyman Abbott, A Dictionary of Religious Knowledge
We "need" cancer because, by the very fact of its insurability, it makes all other diseases,
however virulent, not cancer.
Lyman Abbott
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Abd al-Qadir [`Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri](18081883), Algerian Arab military leader and poet
Death is a black camel, which kneels at the gates of all.
Abd al-Qadir
If I have accepted leadership, this is to have the right to be the first to march in the battles, and I
am ready to step behind any other chief whom you judge more worthy and more capable than me to lead you,
provided that he pledges to take in hand the cause of our faith.
Abd al-Qadir
If on behalf of your king you were to offer me all the riches of France and you were able to place all
of them here on my burnous [raw wool robe], I would prefer to be thrown in this sea, the waves of which
break against the walls of my prison, rather than give up the commitments made towards me publicly and
officially. I shall take these commitments with me to my grave. I am here as your guest. Make me prisoner
if you want. But shame and dishonor will reach you, not me.
Abd al-Qadir, rejecting a bribe offered by
Napoleon III while Abd al-Qadir was imprisoned in Toulon
But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American War? The revolution was effected
before the war commenced. The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.
Geoffrey F. Abert
It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.
Geoffrey F. Abert
One who's our friend is fond of us; one who's fond of us isn't necessarily our friend.
Geoffrey F. Abert
Prosperity depends more on wanting what you have than having what you want.
Geoffr