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A World Without Huge Regions Of Total Wilderness Would Be A Cage; A World Without Lions And Tigers And Vultures And Snakes And Elk And Bison Would Be - Will Be - A Human Zoo. A High-tech Slum.

-Edward Abbey

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A World Without Huge

Edward Abbey

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A World Without Huge Regions Of Total Wilderness Would Be A Cage; A World Without Lions And Tigers And Vultures And Snakes And Elk And Bison Would Be - Will Be - A Human Zoo. A High-tech Slum.

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The Ideal Kitchen-sink Novel: Throw In Everything But The Kitchen Sink. Then Add The Kitchen Sink.

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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.

I Am Delighted, One More Time, By The Daring Of My Species And The Audacity Of Our Flying Machines. There Is Poetry And Music In Our Technology, A Beauty As Touching As That Of Eagle, Moss Campion, Raven Or Yonder Limestone Boulder Shining Under The Arctic Sun.

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Scientific Method: There's A Madness In The Method.

Scientific Method

Music Clouds The Intellect But Clarifies The Heart.

I Stand For What I Stand On.

There Has Never Been An 'original' Sin: Each Is Quite Banal.

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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.

It Is True That Some Of My Fiction Was Based On Actual Events. But The Events Took Place After The Fiction Was Written.

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.

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A Good Writer Must Have More Than Vin Rosé In His Veins, Use More Than Chablis For Ink.

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.

The Death Penalty Would Be Even More Effective, As A Deterrent, If We Executed A Few Innocent People More Often.

Those Who Dream Of The Joys Of Living In A Space Colony Should Live In A Space Colony.

To Be Everywhere At Once Is To Be Nowhere Forever, If You Ask Me.

Original Sin, The True Original Sin, Is The Blind Destruction For The Sake Of Greed Of This Natural Paradise Which Lies All Around Us-if Only We Were Worthy Of It.

In Social Affairs, I'm An Optimist. I Really Do Believe That Our Military- Industrial Civilization Will Soon Collapse.

Not All Questions Can Be Answered.

Government Should Be Weak, Amateurish And Ridiculous. At Present, It Fulfills Only A Third Of The Role.

We're All Undesirable Elements From Somebody's Point Of View.

A City Man Is A 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.

Women: We Cannot Love Them All. But We Must Try.

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.

Mozart, Striving For Perfection, Wrote The Same Symphony Forty-one Times. In His Case, It Worked. He Wrote A Perfect Symphony.

The Majority Of American Writers Today Have Chosen Passive Non-resistance To Things As They Are, Producing Sloughs Of Poetry About Their Personal Angst And Anomie, Cascades Of Short Stories And Rivers Of Novels Obsessed With The Nuances Of Domestic Relationships - Suburban Hanky-panky - Chic Boutique Shopping Mall Literary Soap Opera. When They Do Speak Out On Matters Of Controversy They Attack Not The Evils Of Our Time But Fellow Writers Who May Insist On Complaining.

Readers, Not Critics, Are The People Who Determine A Book's Eventual Fate.

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.

When A Man's Best Friend Is His Dog, That Dog Has A Problem.

I Have Been A Lucky Man. But Someone Has To Be.

If You Feel That You're Not Ready To Die, Never Fear; Nature Will Give You Complete And Adequate Assistance When The Time Comes.

The Missionaries Go Forth To Christianize The Savages - As If The Savages Weren't Dangerous Enough Already.

A Man Without A Horse Is Like A Man Without A Weapon: Stunted And Naked.

The One Thing ... That Is Truly Ugly Is The Climate Of Hate And Intimidation, Created By A Noisy Few, Which Makes The Decent Majority Reluctant To Air In Public Their Views On Anything Controversial. ... Where All Pretend To Be Thinking Alike, It's Likely That No One Is Thinking At All.

Why This Cult Of Wilderness?... Because We Like The Taste Of Freedom; Because We Like The Smell Of Danger.

The Domination Of Nature Leads To The Domination Of Human Nature.

There Are Circumstances In Which Suicide Presents A Viable Option; A Workable Alternative; The Only Sensible Solution.

All We Have, It Seems To Me, Is The Beauty Of Art And Nature And Life, And The Love Which That Beauty Inspires.

Nature And Life

Critics Are Like Ticks On A Dog Or Tits On A Motor: Ornamental But Dysfunctional.

‎"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." E.abbey

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