Wilderness Quotes - Page 30

• Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies. The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating. To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness.

  Samuel Warren Carey

  Wall, Thinking, Dogma

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• If we're talking about Sinai, we can't understand it without the 1967 and 1973 wars, and you can't understand it without the biblical story of Moses leading his people through the wilderness. These are essential elements in the modern conversation about what's going on in the Middle East that seem to have been lost.

  Lawrence Wright

  War, Biblical, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It seems all "protection" has to be monitored, considered, weighed and justified - I am suggesting we do that (but it's something Mary Shelley (and Gertrude Stein) also suggest). "Torch Song," the book's final section, looks at an arson committed by someone hired to protect the wilderness from fires, a catastrophic failure of protection!

  Laura Mullen

  Song, Book, Fire

  Source: therumpus.net

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• But if you'd only ever lived in small wooden house in the middle of wilderness, it sounded much better. Especially because it provided intense community, and these people lived in incredible isolation.

  Christine Jennings

  People, House, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The occupation of America (and Columbus's arrival quite clearly was an occupation, no one can deny that) meant that the entire history of the Native Americans was rendered invisible. The land could only be occupied if it was first defined as empty. So it was defined as a wilderness, even though it had been used by native people for millennia.

  Vandana Shiva

  Native American, Land, People

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• It is commonplace of all religious thought that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a while in the wilderness. If he is of proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel and these are always worth listening to or thinking about.

  Loren Eiseley

  Religious, Men, Thinking

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• What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.

  Anne Rice

  Mean, Kids, College

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• In September 1942 the U.S. government purchased 58,575 acres of wilderness in eastern Tennessee. Soon there was a town, Oak Ridge, and amazing scientific facilities. Thirty-four months after the purchase, an atomic blast lit the New Mexico desert. After 43 months in Iraq, U.S. forces still struggle to cope with improvised explosive devices.

  George Will

  Struggle, Government, Iraq

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• The imaginations excited by the view of an unknown and untravelled wilderness are not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and gardens... The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the thoughts; man is made unwillingly acquainted with his own weakness, and meditation shows him only how little he can sustain, and how little he can perform.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Garden, Views

  Samuel Johnson (1824). “Works: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.255

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• Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

  Elon Musk

  Biofuels, Natural, Ethanol

  "Elon Musk on rockets, sports cars, and solar power". Interview with Micahel Kanellos, www.cnet.com. February 15, 2008.

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• When Jesus was baptized by John, the heavens opened and the Dove descended upon Him. Immediately thereafter, that same Dove drove Him into the wilderness to fast for 40 days and to contend with the territorial strongman over the earth, satan himself. For 40 days, Jesus warred through prayer and fasting to reverse the curse of Adam and Eve and to overcome the devil and release atomic power into the earth. The results recorded in Luke show that history changed forever through the strength and victory the Lord gained by His obedience. Divine power was now His!

  Lou Engle

  Jesus, Prayer, Forever

  Lou Engle (1998). “Digging the Wells of Revival”, p.155, Destiny Image Publishers

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• One would think America big enough to set aside wilderness preserves for the many of our citizens who seek to escape the incessant crowd, to search for solace in solitude amidst a sanctuary far removed from the banality of beer ads and cigarette commercials.

  Frank Church

  Beer, Thinking, America

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• Alack, the night comes on, and the bleak winds
  Do sorely ruffle; for many miles about
  There's scarce a bush.

  William Shakespeare

  Night, Wind, Ruffles

  William Shakespeare, Charles Symmons (1843). “The Dramatic Works and Poems”, p.411

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• The sovereign quality of wilderness is the same wherever encountered.... Each manifestation has an unshackled quality-each stirs untapped longings-each gives a fillip to living-each has an unsurpassed lilt which bursts from the deepest wellsprings of life. These are the realities found in the wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains.

  Harvey Broome

  Reality, Giving, Quality

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• The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
  Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.

  Edward Abbey

  Ideas, Needs, Defense

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• We have a very old conservation movement, particularly in the United States, which has focused on campaigns to protect endangered species: the spotted owl, the old-growth forest. But usually it stops there. To me, biodiversity is the full spectrum. Species conservation is not only about wilderness conservation. It’s also about protecting the livelihood of people even while changing the dominant relationship that humans have had with other species. In India, it’s an economic issue, not just an ecological one.

  Vandana Shiva

  Issues, People, Owl

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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• Even as my family fell apart and things were at their most hopeless, my dad and I found a lot of happiness in the wilderness - sleeping on the cold gravel and killing as many things as we could get our hands on. Even as my mom got progressively more crazy, we found a happiness, in flashes.

  Leigh Newman

  Mom, Dad, Crazy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant. You have to be, in order to survive all the animals and cliffs and crevasses and rapids - at some point, your brain has to kick [out of] that childish daydream world and start making I-want-to-live decisions.

  Leigh Newman

  Growing Up, Kids, Animal

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I wasn't in a position that some other memoirists are, dealing with families who fed them meth, or kidnapped them, or did something that would make the writer not want to see that family again. I wanted to see my family. I wanted to celebrate them. I was proud of who we were, in the wilderness, floating down rapids or hiking over glaciers, and everywhere else.

  Leigh Newman

  Hiking, Floating, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

  Alan Moore

  Opportunity, Voice, People

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• The only thing left worth saving is wilderness.

  Edward Abbey

  Saving, Left

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• A dangerous thesis has taken hold among many in the GOP: that it might be better to lose the '06 election and re-group. In American history, when a faction in the majority party decides the party is tired and could benefit from some time in the wilderness, the voters usually oblige. Most recently, the latest issue of Washington Monthly includes a cover story featuring seven such articles from prominent Republican strategists, insiders and commentators.

  Larry Sabato

  Party, Taken, Tired

  "Angry Politics: 'Voters Gone Wild' in 2006" by Larry Sabato and David Wasserman, www.realclearpolitics.com. September 17, 2006.

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• I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment.

  Aldo Leopold

  Law, Accomplishment, Tasks

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• The wilderness is gone, the buckskin man is gone, the painted Indian has hit the trail over the Great Divide, the hardships and privations of pioneer life which did so much to develop sterling manhood are now but a legend in history, and we must depend upon the Boy Scout movement to produce the MEN of the future.

  Daniel Carter Beard

  Men, Boys, Legends

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• There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

  Robert Smithson

  Photography, Artist, Years

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.371, Univ of California Press

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