Folks Quote by 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

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Folks Kind Stupidity Thinking Trouble Wisdom

More by Edward Abbey

A 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…

Edward Abbey

Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote _The Golden Ass_.

Edward Abbey

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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…

Edward Abbey

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By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

Edward Abbey

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“Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power, we gain freedom from personal responsibility for what we do and are forced to do - the seduction of it - but we lose the dignity of being real men and women. Power corrupts; attracts the…

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…

Edward Abbey

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Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Edward Abbey

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Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.

Edward Abbey

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“But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked…

Edward Abbey

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

Edward Abbey

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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,…

Edward Abbey

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“Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave…

Edward Abbey

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It's like the query letter problem that I just mentioned, magnified a hundredfold. You might be good at telling a story, but that doesn't mean you know anything about marketing. Or layout. Or editing. Or publicity. Or selling your books for foreign markets.Everyone can point to a few examples of people that have done very well for themselves self-publishing. But…

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The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists - as starting revolutions - does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much this country was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how…

Grace Lee Boggs

That's something a lot of folks don't know about me - I'm pretty darn funny.

Michael Jai White

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My folks tried to make a preacher of me and missed by a narrow margin… I would have made a good one if I…

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Life as we know it is fundamentally unsatisfying. I think most folks feel this to be true. They know that a life of aimless consumption isn't much of a life. And work offers us very little satisfaction. Plus our work and consumption is destroying the environment. And this is in the rich countries. Add starvation, etc. to the mix, and…

Michael Yates