The Empty Land Quotes

“If you’re going to have peace rather than violence, both sides have got to want it. One side alone can’t make peace.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Empty Land

“You tried. You’re too decent a man, Felton—they don’t operate that way. They take decency for weakness, and weakness represents opportunity to them. You’re a good man, but you’ve lived too long in an orderly civilization. It’s different out here in the open.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Empty Land

“He was the only man she had ever known who made her feel protected. He made her feel safe, secure. And the feeling was strange to her.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Empty Land

“We’re all responsible,” he said presently to Laurie. “Law and order is a job for all of us. If we shirk it long enough we will have anarchy, and all we’ve built will be destroyed. It is like building a beautiful building and then turning a lot of wild animals into it and letting them go. “This is the old war, the war of civilization against the barbarian; of peacefulness, order, and hard work against the heedless, the cruel, the destructive.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Empty Land

“For there are, in the affairs of men and nations, inexorable tides from which they cannot remain aloof. If they do not enter upon them prepared, they will be caught unprepared, and at the wrong time.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Empty Land