Destructiveness Quotes - Page 2

• Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.

  Adrienne Rich

  Eye, Self, Survival

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• The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.

  Erich Fromm

  Stronger, Outcomes, Life Is

  Erich Fromm (1941). “Escape from Freedom”, Henry Holt & Company

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• It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Suicide, Pain, Motivation

  FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from Feb 18, 2013

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• But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly.

  Keith Ablow

  Self, Sometimes, Produce

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• Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.

  Jerry Saltz

  Wall, Cutting, Creating

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• I see the mind of the five-year-old as a volcano with two vents: destructiveness and creativeness.

  Sylvia Ashton-Warner

  Teacher, Years, Two

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• We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war. A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.

  Douglas MacArthur

  War, Discovery, Civilization

  Radio Broadcast to the Nation Following the USS Missouri Surrender Ceremony, delivered 2 September 1945, USS Missouri, Tokyo Bay, Japan

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• In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

  Leo Rosten

  Fear, Book, Dark

  Leo Calvin Rosten (1959). “The return of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n”

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• Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  War, Hands, Civilization

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• For the other end of the spectrum, the 50 to 85 percent of the world's population who are not the recipients of privilege, the world they know is almost certainly worse than any their earlier counterparts knew. It is likely they are worse off materially, despite the technological changes. In substantive as opposed to formal terms, they are more, not less, subject to arbitrary constraints, since the central mechanisms are more pervasive and more efficient. And they bear the brunt of the various kinds of psychic malaise, as well as of the destructiveness of civil wars.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  War, Psychics, Technological Change

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• I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think it can also mean self-reflection and poetic sensiblity. It can mean empathy, hedonism, a libertarianism.

  Courtney Love

  Rap, Mean, Thinking

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• Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?

  Erich Fromm

  Spiritual, Jesus, Revenge

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Escape from Freedom”, p.11, Open Road Media

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• Nurture your felt love for nature. Never deny it. That love is the eons, the purifying intelligence, beauty and diversity of nature sustaining us in its perfection. Our disconnection from this love and its advice produces our hurt, greed and destructiveness. We must reconnect and restore its peaceful voice in our thoughts, soul and surroundings.

  Michael J Cohen

  Hurt, Love Is, Voice

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• Madame Bovary is one my favorite novels. Emma Bovary will always be an enigma, but as the years pass, I feel that I understand her better. She has a violent nostalgia, almost an infantile nostalgia, to be understood by the men surrounding her. I like her relentless fight for independence, her rebellion against the mediocre, and her quest for the sublime, even if she burns her wigs in the process. I like that Flaubert never judges her morally for her self-destructiveness, for her desperate attempt to satisfy her wildest desires and appetites.

  Sophie Barthes

  Fighting, Men, Self

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• In this hope, among the things we teach to the young are such truths as the transcendent value of the individual and the dignity of all people, the futility and stupidity of war, its destructiveness of life and its degradation of human values.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  War, People, Stupidity

  Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1961). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960-1961”, p.315, Best Books on

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• Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Summer, Sports, Spring

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• I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.

  Douglas MacArthur

  War, Mean, Men

  Farewell Address to Congress, delivered 19 April 1951

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• The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  War, Expression, Development

  Rosa Luxemburg, Peter Hudis, Kevin Anderson (2004). “The Rosa Luxemburg reader”, Monthly Review Pr

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• destructiveness comes only when life isn't lived. People who can live their lives don't destroy themselves.

  Pearl S. Buck

  People

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• When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn't believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Believe, Levels

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• Men since the beginning of time have sought peace...military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn have failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war not blots out this alternative.

  Douglas MacArthur

  Military, War, Men

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• To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel.

  Sheldon B. Kopp

  Angel, Creative

  SHELDON B KOPP (1972). “IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA ON THE ROAD KILL HIM THE PILGRIMAGE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY PATIENTS”

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