David Rice > David's Quotes

“Dr. Albert Frock: Well, how goes the gradual extinction of the human race, Lieutenant?
Lt. Vincent D'Agosta: I'm doing what I can to keep it orderly.”
― Douglas Preston

“There was a pause while Pendergast considered this. “I prefer hypocrisy to poverty.”
― Douglas Preston, Blue Labyrinth

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
― Edward Abbey

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
― Edward Abbey

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”
― Edward Abbey

“A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”
― Edward Abbey, The Best of Edward Abbey

“Freedom begins between the ears.”
― Edward Abbey

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”
― Edward Abbey

“If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”
― Edward Abbey

“The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”
― Edward Abbey

“I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.”
― Edward Abbey

“Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.”
― Edward Abbey

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. ”
― Edward Abbey

“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

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”
― Edward Abbey

“Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.”
― Edward Abbey

“An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”
― Edward Abbey

“Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.”
― Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader

“When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.”
― Edward Abbey

“Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.”
― Edward Abbey