Edward Abbey Quotes

Comedians are sociologists. We're pointing out stuff that the general public doesn't even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

Isn't it in the nature of intellectuals to be culture critics?

The 100% American is 99% idiot.

The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.

The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it.

I'm interested in social commentary.

Critics have a responsibility to put things in a cultural and sociological or political context. That is important.

When you've got somebody who's a flaming liberal like Bill Maher calling you out, something's wrong.

There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

Disney is thrilling and informative and important and beautiful and suspect. Butts was a detail I observed later and definitely ties in. I suppose I was programmed, yeah.

I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.

I am strongly convinced that the people or society is the best and the most unerring critic.

The American people are sheep. They're comfortable, rich, working. It's like the Romans, they're happy with bread and their spectator sports. The Super Bowl means more to them than any right.

As my Russian improves, I become increasingly conscious of just what sort of a society I live in.

Lenny Bruce is a very moral man trying to improve the world and trying to make audiences think.

'Do you pray for the senators, Dr. Hale?' No, I look at the senators and I pray for the country.

If you look at our world, it's a world of critique.

I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.

Well, a lot of people within government and big business are nervous of Hip Hop and Hip Hop artists, because they speak their minds. They talk about what they see and what they feel and what they know. They reflect what's around them.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.

I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.

Saying my President “right or wrong” is like saying my driver “drunk or sober.”

When Dr. [Samuel] Johnson called patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel, he forgot the possibilities contained in the word Reform.

I am a Utopian. What else would I be? I am living in America.