Destruction Quotes - Page 25

• All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid.

  Albert Pike

  Degrees, Devastation, Violent

  Albert Pike “Morals and Dogma : Scottish Rite in Freemasonry”, Lulu.com

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• It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.

  Karl Kraus

  Lust, Normal, Particular

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

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• We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction.

  Rachel Carson

  Reality, Men, Vanity

  "Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson", edited by Linda Lear, (p. 91), 1999.

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• (The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.

  Lewis Mumford

  Drinking, Air, Water

  "The Theory and Practice of Regionalism". The Sociological Review, vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2, 1928.

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• Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

  Barbara Tuchman

  War, Cost, Pay

  "A Distant Mirror". Book by Barbara Tuchman, p. 81, 1978.

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• Just as the Security Council was largely irrelevant to the great struggle of the last half of the twentieth century - freedom against Communism - so too it is largely on the sidelines in our contemporary struggles against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

  John Bolton

  Struggle, Mass Destruction, Half

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• It would scarcely be destruction," he replied gently. "Let us call it iconoclasm, the swallowing of formulas, which has always had its full retinue of idealists. And you do not want a Napoleon . All that is needed is direction, which could be given by men of far lower gifts than a Bonaparte. In a word, you want a Power-House, and then the age of miracles will begin.

  John Buchan

  Men, House, Miracle

  John Buchan (2016). “The Complete Works of John Buchan (Unabridged): Thriller Classics, Spy Novels, Supernatural Tales, Short Stories, Poetry, Historical Works, The Great War Writings, Essays, Biographies & Memoirs – All in One Volume”, p.1674, e-artnow

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• I propose the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the United States. The Cuban people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution.

  Fidel Castro

  Sacrifice, People, Victory

  "Castro Wanted a Nuclear Strike". The New York Times, October 23, 1992.

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• From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.

  R. D. Laing

  Pseudo, Patient, Madness

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• Women from earliest times have been used as conveniences of communication with unseen, inaccessible powers, but always in the sense that such exposing of self to dangerous mysteries, such destruction of the understanding as was required to become the slave of unseen powers, did not matter because the communicant was only a woman, in herself an undetermined cipher - a nothing.

  Laura Riding

  Communication, Self, Understanding

  "The Idea of God". "Essays from 'Epilogue' 1935-1937". Book by Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Mark Jacobs, 2001.

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• I have always been very much involved in the pseudo biological cycle of production, consumption and destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished by the fact that one of its most conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and rejected odd objects.

  Arman

  Art, Our World, Long

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• Our political process appears to be a toxic dance of mutually assured destruction that takes all the citizens down with you, and that can't be right. So I've prepared a little experiment.

  Tim Dorsey

  Political, Toxic, Citizens

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• Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn't improved.

  Jaron Lanier

  Pain, Class, Ideas

  Jaron Lanier (2014). “Who Owns the Future?”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• Sport, which mimics the language and emotional intensity of war but eliminates
  the fatal destruction, may be a form of redemption.

  Ed Ayres

  Sports, War, Emotional

  Ed Ayres (2013). “The Longest Race: A Lifelong Runner, An Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance”, p.91, Workman Publishing

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• I've learned to distinguish between the greatness of God and the inexcusable evil that has been done by those professing his name. And so I do not deduce [as Christopher Hitchens does] that God is not great, and that religion poisons everything. After all, if I failed to distinguish between the genius of Einstein and the abuse of his science to create weapons of mass destruction, I might be tempted to say science is not great, and technology poisons everything.

  John Lennox

  Technology, Greatness, Mass Destruction

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• The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the 'button' to be 'pushed' by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point--that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment--is a fact against which belief rebels.

  Jonathan Schell

  Hair, Years, Fire

  Jonathan Schell (2000). “The Fate of the Earth: And, The Abolition”, p.182, Stanford University Press

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• This other war, the war upon destruction of natural assets is one that will never be finished. Our weakness in this vast war is largely ignorance, that most of our citizens do not realize what is going on under their very feet.

  Louis Bromfield

  War, Ignorance, Feet

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• The workmen's revolution, with the terrors of destruction and murder, not only threatens us, but we have already been living upon its verge during the last thirty years, and it is only by various cunning devices that we have been postponing the crisis. The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Years, Class, People

  "What is to be done?". Book by Leo Tolstoy, p. 262, 1899.

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• Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is ... death! Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.The choice lies with you!

  Peter Kropotkin

  Crush, War, Lying

  "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal". Book by Peter Kropotkin, 1896.

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• It is due to neither impotence nor ignorance on God’s part that evils occur in the world, but it is owing to the order of his wisdom and to the greatness of his goodness, whence come the many and divers grades of goodness in things, many of which would be lacking were he to allow no evil to exist. Thus there would be no good of patience without the evil of persecution, nor the good of the preservation of its life in a lion, without the evil of the destruction of the animals on which it lives.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Ignorance, Greatness, Animal

  "'De Potentia' ('On Power')". Book by Thomas Aquinas, q. 3, art. 6, ad 4, dhspriory.org.

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• The law is a battery, which protects all that is behind it, but sweeps with destruction all that is outside.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Law, Batteries, Protect

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• The world, and whatever that be which we call the heavens, by the vault of which all things are enclosed, we must conceive to be a deity, to be eternal, without bounds, neither created nor subject at any time to destruction. To inquire what is beyond it is no concern of man; nor can the human mind form any conjecture concerning it.

  Pliny the Elder

  Men, Heaven, Mind

  Pliny the Elder (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Pliny the Elder (Illustrated)”, p.1, Delphi Classics

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• The Communist threat from without must not blind us to the Communist threat from within. The latter is reaching into the very heart of America through its espionage agents and a cunning, defiant, and lawless communist party, which is fanatically dedicated to the Marxist cause of world enslavement and destruction of the foundations of our republic.

  J. Edgar Hoover

  Party, Heart, America

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• I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.

  Edith Wharton

  Exercise, Errands, Function

  Edith Wharton (2016). “Tales of Men and Ghosts: American Literature”, p.141, VM eBooks

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• Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to "respect" it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings.

  Richard Dawkins

  Children, Believe, Islam

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