Destroying Quotes - Page 15

• Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that's in short supply can't be carved up and shared without destroying it.

  John Brunner

  Opportunity, Ideas, Giving

  John Brunner (2011). “Stand on Zanzibar”, p.216, Macmillan

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• The time for miracles has either passed or not come yet, besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means destroying the very order of things in order to improve them.

  Jose Saramago

  Mean, Order, Ideas

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• The Arab awakening has been, up to now, a lot about freedom from dictatorial regimes - Syria, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain and Egypt. But once you got freedom from, then you need freedom to. Freedom from is about destroying things. Freedom to is about constructing things, constructing the rule of law.

  Thomas Friedman

  Egypt, Law, Needs

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• I can think of nothing more soul destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing you want desperately to do well, and to know that you are at the best second rate.

  Agatha Christie

  Happiness, Success, Thinking

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• The phrase 'contrary to all expectations' rings through the story of the progress of human knowledge. It was 'contrary to all expectations' that the Earth was found to revolve around the sun, and not the other way round, and that a mould growing in one of Dr. Alexander Fleming's dishes was found to be capable of destroying bacteria. When in 1989 the spacecraft Voyager 2 got close enough to the planet Naptune to take detailed pictures of the surface, they were 'contrary to all expectations'.

  Anthony Terence Quincey Stewart

  Science, Expectations, Progress

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• The Space Shuttle is the most effective device known to man for destroying dollar bills.

  Dana Rohrabacher

  Men, Space, Dollar Bills

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• Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal.

  Robert Bellarmine

  Wisdom, Animal, Men

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• One of the Christian fundamentalists' goals seems to be to rebuild the Temple, which means destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which presumably means war with the Arab world - one of the goals, perhaps, in fulfilling the prophecy of Armageddon. So they strongly support Israeli power and expansionism, and help fund it and lobby for it; but they also support actions that are very harmful and objectionable to most of its population - as do Jewish fundamentalist groups, mostly rooted in the US, which, after all, is one of the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies in the world.

  Noam Chomsky

  Christian, Religious, War

  Source: chomsky.info

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• Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.

  Thomas Sowell

  Wise, Clever, Men

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• We should recall that during the Second World War and the Great Depression there was an upsurge in popular, radical democracy. In all over the world. It took different forms, but it was there, everywhere. In Greece it was in the Greek revolution, and so on. And it had to be crushed. In countries like Greece, it was crushed by violence. In countries like Italy, where the US forces entered in 1943, it was crushed by attacking and destroying the anti-German partisans and restoring the traditional order.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, War, Order

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• endurance of inescapable sorrow is something which has to be learned alone. And only to endure is not enough. Endurance can be a harsh and bitter root in one's life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying other lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Acceptance, Roots, Joy

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• There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength.

  Paul Bourget

  Idols, Intellectual, Delight

  Paul Bourget (1908). “Cosmopolis: Crowned by the French Academy”

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• In Europe itself it is not probable that war will ever absolutely cease until science discovers some destroying force so simple in its administration, so horrible in its effects, that all art, all gallantry, will be at an end, and battles will be massacres which the feelings of mankind will be unable to endure.

  William Winwood Reade

  Art, War, Simple

  William Winwood Reade (1892). “The Martyrdom of Man”

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• A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

  Margaret Atwood

  Ignorance, Poetry, Dignity

  "Margaret Atwood : Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered At Hay On Wye, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• Entities have died, but what they seek is life again. They miss it. They want to experience food again, basic things. They are low on the evolutionary scale. They want to experience the joy of destroying something.

  Frederick Lenz

  Joy, Missing, Want

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• Some people like destroying for the hell of it; they love destroying beauty; they try to feel those people and then crack the egg.

  Frederick Lenz

  Eggs, People, Trying

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• Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face.

  Frank Herbert

  Technology, Tools, Faces

  "The Maker of Dune: Insights of a Master of Science Fiction". Book edited by Tim O'Reilly, "Conversations in Port Townsend," (1983), 1987.

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• It is not possible to remake this country, to democratize it, humanize it, make it serious, as long as we have teenagers killing people for play and offending life, destroying the dream, and making love unviable. If education alone cannot transform society, without it society cannot change either.

  Paulo Freire

  Dream, Country, Teenager

  Paulo Freire (2015). “Pedagogy of Indignation”, p.50, Routledge

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• War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

  Paullina Simons

  War, Lying, Men

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• It's about panic. It's about fear. It's about instilling the American populace with terror, dread, and apprehension about the future. It's all about making you think that your way of life is "destroying the world." America is the root of all evil in the world, according to the environmentalist wackos. You, the citizens of the United States, are ruining everything.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Thinking, Roots, America

  Rush H. Limbaugh (1994). “See, I Told You So”, Pocket Books

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• So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

  Charles Kingsley

  Creating, Giving, Miracle

  Charles Kingsley (1881). “The Works of Charles Kingsley: Yeast”

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• The only thing not worth destroying is science. That would be useless. Science is unchangeable, and if you destroyed it today, it would rise up again the same as before.

  Leonid Andreyev

  Today, Would Be, Useless

  Leonid Andreyev (1914). “Savva: The Life of Man : Two Plays ...”

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• 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

  Animal, Men, Vanity

  "The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West". Book by Edward Abbey ("Shadows from the Big Woods", p. 225), 1977.

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• The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Mother, Children, Father

  Sherwood Anderson (1995). “Winesburg, Ohio”, p.83, Courier Corporation

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• The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar. ... I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless - it was nature destroying its own creation - its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion - was this not madness, was this not unreason?

  Pearl S. Buck

  Self, Sea, Weather

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