A Quote by 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

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Betraying Bread Civilization Cutting Destroys Good Human Human Spirit Itself Little Lives Luxury Necessity Off Original Origins Our Our Lives Principle Remains Spare Spirit Vital Water Which Wild Wilderness

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Edward Abbey
American - Author
January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

What the Indians are saying is that they are recognizing the right of wilderness to be wilderness. Wilderness is not an extension of human need or of human justification. It is itself and it is inviolate, itself. This does not mean that, therefore, we become separated from it, because we don't. We stay connected if, once in our lives, we learn exactly what that connection is between our heart, our womb, our mind, and wilderness. And when each of us has her wilderness within her, we can be together in a balanced kind of way. The forever, we have that within us.

Paula Gunn Allen

Wilderness itself is the basis of all our civilization. I wonder if we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness the right to live on?

Margaret Murie

What little wilderness remains displays the patterns we must return to, if our species and as many others as now remain are to persist here a while. Ideally this would call for a broad cultural rapprochment with the wild, a long overdue armistice in civilization's war upon it.

Stephanie Mills

Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

Tom C. Clark

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

Edward Abbey

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Emile Zola

Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.

Edmund Burke

Think of our DNA. In the last million years, our DNA hasn't changed at all. It's really much the same as it was in the jungle, a million, two millions years ago. But in the last 200 years, our destructive capacities have increased many, many millions of times over. Why don't we see intelligent signals from outer space? Because in all likelihood, once the civilization reaches the point our civilization has reached, it destroys itself.

Stephen Hawking

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Edward Abbey

That sacred space of conscience where you can exercise your rights in terms of religious freedom and deeply-held, reasonable beliefs is the core of human dignity. In fact, that's the basis for civilization itself. And when you lose that fundamental principle... you have no basis on which to build.

Jeff Fortenberry

A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

Edward Abbey

One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.

Sigmund Freud

Let me repeat that: Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down. Get used to that. When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus.

Charles Eisenstein

Material civilization, nay, even luxury, is necessary to create work for the poor. Bread! Bread! I do not believe in a God who cannot give me bread here, giving me eternal bliss in heaven!

Bill Vaughan

It depends on the state itself to retain or abolish the principle of representation, because it depends on itself whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed. This right must be considered as an ingredient in the original composition of the general government, which, though not expressed, was mutually understood. . .

William Rawle

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.

Hannah Arendt

A Quote by Edward Abbey

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