Edward Abbey - Power Quotes

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Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

Edward Abbey
Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.

Edward Abbey
Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.

Edward Abbey
One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.

Edward Abbey
The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

Edward Abbey
Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea....

Edward Abbey
Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.

Edward Abbey
Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

Edward Abbey
I would expand the Biblical aphorism... in this fashion: the root of all evil is the love of power. And power attracts the worst and corrupts the best among men.

Edward Abbey
Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.

Edward Abbey
All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.

Edward Abbey
Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.

Edward Abbey
Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

Edward Abbey
It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?

Edward Abbey
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

Edward Abbey
Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good. Heroes do not want power over others.

Edward Abbey
Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.

Edward Abbey
If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.

Edward Abbey
Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles....

Edward Abbey
A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.

Edward Abbey