A Quote by Edward Abbey

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.

Edward Abbey

Quote Topics

Account Banal Committed Disasters History Imperial Largely Levers Little Machines Men Recorded

Quote Author

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

Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men — and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort — as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.

Lois McMaster Bujold

We don't want crimes committed in New Mexico falling through the cracks. This legislation ensures that there is no area of our state where crimes can be committed without consequence.

Pete Domenici

In 5,000 years of recorded human history... neither in the east or in the west... has any society ever defined marriage as anything other than between men and women. Not one in 5000 years of recorded human history. That's an astounding fact and it isn't until the last 12 years or so that we have seen for the first time in recorded human history marriage defined as anything other than between men and between women.

Michele Bachmann

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

C.P. Snow

All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Little crimes breed big crimes. You smile at little crimes and then big crimes blow your head off.

Terry Pratchett

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.

Oscar Wilde

The crimes committed by the North Vietnamese regime against the Vietnamese people were minor compared to the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodians, but for us on the left they were emotionally far more significant.

James Donald

...history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.

Paul Tillich

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes

Murray Edelman

Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.

Evgeny Morozov

You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.

Charlie Munger

I do believe that Obama is at war with Islam, it is never too late to embrace Islam. If we were to establish Sharia in America, he would have to stand before Sharia court and pay for the crimes that he committed. The invitation is there for him to give up all of his falsehoods and all of the crimes that he has committed and to embrace Islam.