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 AbbeyThe 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 AbbeyIndolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
Edward AbbeyA 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 AbbeyThe artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.
Edward AbbeySimplicity 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 AbbeyThe tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer."
Edward AbbeyFor 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!
Edward AbbeyAmong politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'
Edward AbbeyBut it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.
Edward AbbeyWar: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.
Edward AbbeyI suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy.
Edward AbbeyI would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.
Edward AbbeyHigh 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 AbbeyMost of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.
Edward AbbeyI have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a "surly, illmannered, badtempered fellow." ... Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.
Edward AbbeyThe ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.
Edward AbbeyThe 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 AbbeyMy books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.
Edward AbbeyA mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.
Edward AbbeyI must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.
Edward AbbeyNew 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 AbbeyThe 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 AbbeyIt is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.
Edward AbbeyAh yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.
Edward AbbeyNobody 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 AbbeyReincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?
Edward AbbeyThe consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.
Edward AbbeyI 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 AbbeyThe 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