Quote

All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?

Edward Abbey

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Need
Needs
Governments
Justify
Enemies
Enemy
Existence
Else
Government

More quotes by Edward Abbey

Image
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
Edward Abbey
Image
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him he harms nobody and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
Edward Abbey
Image
Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
Edward Abbey
Image
War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.
Edward Abbey
Image
Literature, 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 Abbey
Image
A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.
Edward Abbey
Image
I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.
Edward Abbey
Image
When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my checkbook.
Edward Abbey
Image
If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
Edward Abbey
Image
We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.
Edward Abbey
Image
I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
Edward Abbey
Image
The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
Edward Abbey
Image
Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
Edward Abbey
Image
I 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 Abbey
Image
A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.
Edward Abbey
Image
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.
Edward Abbey
Image
Concrete is heavy iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.
Edward Abbey
Image
There are no vacant lots in nature.
Edward Abbey
Image
My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.
Edward Abbey
Image
The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.
Edward Abbey