“The "Terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.”

—  Edward Abbey

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The "Terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousan…" by Edward Abbey?
Edward Abbey photo
Edward Abbey 146
American author and essayist 1927–1989

Related quotes

Stephen King photo

“May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: Wolves of the Calla

Mark Twain photo

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Ch. 13 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-13.html
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

“The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years…”

Ch 6
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo
Context: The monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant but tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave." The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wild-boy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday — someday, or some century — an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...

Sinclair Lewis photo
Željko Glasnović photo

“Nobody has seen shovel here in the last ten years.”

Željko Glasnović (1954) Croatian politician

appeal in Croatian Parliament, 11 January 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG98eha1GbY
Qoutes

Lobão photo

“It is better to live ten years at a thousand [miles per hour] than a thousand years at a ten”

Lobão (1957) Brazilian musician

From the lyrics of his song Vida Louca, Vida (Life, Crazy Life)

Sepp Dietrich photo

“I'm iron. I lasted through ten years of war, and now I can last through this. It's true, it's not good for the nerves.”

Sepp Dietrich (1892–1966) German SS commander

To Leon Goldensohn, February 28, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004 - Page 280

W.E.B. Du Bois photo

“The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West.”

Source: Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 727
Context: The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.

Gloria Estefan photo

“I've bought more music for my Ipod in one year than I bought in the last ten years of my life.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

thestrippodcast.com (September 9, 2006)
2007, 2008

Related topics