Destruction Quotes - Page 31

• I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves. ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Laughter, Real, Humor

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• Be as far from desiring the popular love as fearful to deserve the popular hate; ruin dwells in both: the one will hug thee to death; the other will crush thee to destruction: to escape the first, be not ambitious; to avoid the second, be not seditious.

  Francis Quarles

  Love, Crush, Hate

  Francis Quarles (1844). “Enchiridion Institutions, Essays and Maxims, political, moral & divine. Divided into four centuries. By Francis Quarles”, p.39

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• When ambitious men find an open passage, they are rather busy than dangerous; and if well watched in their proceedings, they will catch them selves in their own snare, and prepare a way for their own destruction.

  Francis Quarles

  Ambition, Men, Self

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• War is the matter which fills all history; and consequently the only, or almost the only, view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape: and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another.

  Edmund Burke

  War, Views, Political

  Edmund Burke (1963). “Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches”, p.58, Transaction Publishers

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• The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Knowing, Victory, Doe

  Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph C. Landis (1986). “Aspects of I.B. Singer”

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• All my humor is based upon destruction and despair.

  Lenny Bruce

  Despair

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• By 'coming to terms with life' I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.

  Etty Hillesum

  Mean, Eye, Reality

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• I trust in due time to lay the perfidy, meanness, and wickedness of [Henry] Clay naked before the American people. I have lately got an intimation of some of his secret movements, which, if I can reach with positive and responsible proof, I will wield to his political, and perhaps his actual, destruction.

  Andrew Jackson

  People, Political, Secret

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• If in madness of delusion, anyone shall lift his parricidal hand against this blessed union, the arms of thousands will be raised to save it, and the curse of millions will fall upon the head which may have plotted its destruction.

  Andrew Jackson

  Blessed, Fall, Hands

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• Marx was wrong: It is not only the 'means of production' that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or just war readiness, are daunting. ... The resulting cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best terms a 'depleted' state, in which the military has drained reources from all other social functions.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Military, War, Mean

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• Soldiers in arms! Defenders of our soil!
  Who from destruction save us; who from spoil
  Protect the sons of peace, who traffic or who toil;
  Would I could duly praise you, that each deed
  Your foe's might honor, and your friends might read.

  George Crabbe

  Son, Soldier, Honor

  George Crabbe, “The Borough. Letter Vi: Professions--Law”

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• I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.

  Freya Stark

  Believe, Long, Our Words

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• Pride may go before a fall, but jealousy goes before destruction.

  Gladys Taber

  Jealousy, Fall, Pride

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• Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction - in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.

  Elaine Pagels

  Book, Egypt, Years

  Elaine Pagels (2004). “The Gnostic Gospels”, p.17, Random House

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• When you don't work together you can't emerge as a force. It becomes what some call a "lonely struggle" and individual self-destruction.

  Haile Gerima

  Lonely, Struggle, Self

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• What we will not wait for is that particular nexus of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction that is extremism, and the technology to come together in a way that is harmful to the United States.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Technology, Mass Destruction, Waiting

  Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

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• Women not only get violated, but then we take on the struggle to end it too... As a man, how could the destruction of women be anything to you but devastating? Think about the fact that the women being hurt are your mothers, daughters, sisters.

  Eve Ensler

  Daughter, Mother, Hurt

  Interview with Kevin Powell, bknation.org. May 1, 2014.

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• Ministers who threaten death and destruction employ weapons of weakness. Argument and kindness are alone effectual, flavored by the principles of Divine love.

  Hosea Ballou

  Kindness, Weakness, Principles

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• It is the goodly outside that sin puts on which tempteth to destruction. It has been said that sin is like the bee, with honey in its mouth, but a sting in its tail.

  Hosea Ballou

  Tails, Mouths, Honey

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• Factions among yourselves; preferring such
  To offices and honors, as ne'er read
  The elements of saving policy;
  But deeply skilled in all the principles
  That usher to destruction.

  Philip Massinger

  Office, Honor, Principles

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• Ah! that Senate is a world of ice and darkness! It votes the destruction of peoples as the simplest and wisest thing; for its members themselves are moribund.

  George Sand

  Ice, Darkness, World

  George Sand (2009). “Letters of George Sand”, p.335, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Envy has been, is, and shall be, the destruction of many. What is there, that Envy hath not defamed, or Malice left undefiled? Truly, no good thing.

  Pythagoras

  Envy, Good Things, Malice

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• Words can be like weapons of destruction: It takes so much effort, and the cooperation of so many people, to build something - and so little effort of so few to tear it down.

  Deborah Tannen

  People, Effort, Tears

  Deborah Tannen (2012). “The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue”, p.82, Ballantine Books

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• The destruction of the personality is the great evil of the time.

  Ellen Key

  Evil, Personality

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• Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Democracy, Humans, Seeds

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