Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Abbey

A two-beat jab like this only works because Abbey compresses a whole political philosophy into barnyard imagery. “Taxation” is the neutral, civics-class term: public goods, shared burdens, the cost of living in a society. Abbey immediately punctures that respectability with a colon, as if translating propaganda into plain speech. What follows isn’t debate, it’s exposure: “how the sheep are shorn.” Not robbed at gunpoint, not persuaded, not represented. Shorn. The verb matters because it’s routine, seasonal, and almost hygienic. Sheep don’t fight back; they’re handled. The extraction is framed as normal husbandry.

The subtext is contempt for the comforting story citizens tell themselves: that their compliance is a sign of maturity, that the system is reciprocal, that the pain is evenly distributed. Abbey’s sheep metaphor implies a public trained to accept being managed, even to mistake management for care. It also slyly indicts the people doing the shearing: not abstract “government,” but whoever benefits from a population that can be predictably clipped - bureaucracies, political machines, corporate interests that launder their take through policy.

Context sharpens the bite. Abbey, a desert anarchist with an environmentalist streak, distrusted centralized power and the bureaucratic taming of wild places and wild people. Coming of age in the mid-century security state, he saw taxation not as community investment but as one more lever of control - a way to finance projects that flatten landscapes and domesticate dissent. The line’s sting is its cynicism: the scandal isn’t that shearing happens, it’s that the flock learns to stand still for it.