America Quote by Edward Abbey

“I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking…” quote by Edward Abbey — Download Open image

“I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.”

Edward Abbey

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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…

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The costs of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion - a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt America by drawing it into a trap. The 2011 military budget - almost matching that of the rest of the world combined - is higher in…

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Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who…

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Today, the world looks to America for leadership. And America looks to its Corps of Marines.

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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…

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I'll smoke, I'll cough, I'll get the tumors, I'll die, deal? Thank you America. [salutes]

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America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people,…

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I'm gonna bring America together.

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In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia.:; The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no…

George Orwell