If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.
Edward AbbeyThere is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.
Edward AbbeyEdmund 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 AbbeyProverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
Edward AbbeyGovernment: 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 AbbeyOnce 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 AbbeyA man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.
Edward AbbeyIn 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 AbbeyVaughan Telecom installers and contractors ensure the highest quality service for data and network cabling in Toronto and GTA area.
Edward AbbeyA shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.
Edward AbbeyBeware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
Edward AbbeyThe best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything -- while the music lasts.
Edward AbbeyAmerica 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 AbbeyTo meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.
Edward AbbeyThe rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
Edward AbbeyOur 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 AbbeyThe most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
Edward AbbeyThe "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
Edward AbbeyNature, like Maimonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.
Edward AbbeyWhat 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 AbbeyPreacher 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 AbbeyDoctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.
Edward AbbeyIf you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully -- as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.
Edward AbbeyNarrow-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 AbbeyThe absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.
Edward AbbeyI despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.
Edward AbbeyMy own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.
Edward AbbeyIt is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.
Edward AbbeyLiterature, 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 AbbeyShakespeare 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 AbbeyThe extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.
Edward AbbeyBe loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
Edward Abbey