Destruction Quotes

The tragic side of many architectural enterprises is that they destroy natural beauties which are a priceless possession and cannot be replaced.

You ask what I have found and far and wide I go,Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew,The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?

In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

Hatred plays the same part in government as acid in chemistry.

Those who don't build must burn.

O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away.

Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.

Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

The Dark Ages may return-the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science; and what might now shower immeasureable material blessings upon mankind may even bring about its total destruction. Beware! I say. Time may be short.Referring to the discovery of atomic energy.

For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indiansand hunters make of nature! No wonder that their race is so soon exterminated.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Nor do I take into account a danger of starting a chain reaction of a scope great enough todestroy part or all of the planet...But it is not necessary to imagine the earth being destroyed like a nova by a stellar explosion to understand vividly the grow ing scope of atomic war and to recognize that unless another war is prevented it is likely to bring destruction on a scale never before held possible, and even now hardly conceived, and that little civilization would survive it.

But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.

And violence is impractical, because the old eye for an eye philosophy ends up leaving everybody blind .. It is immoral because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for everybody. Means and ends are inseparable. The means represent the ideal in the making; in the long run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness - breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Thriftless ambition, that wilt ravin up Thine own life's means!

Even a little untruth destroys a man, as a drop of poison ruins milk.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

It is long and hard and painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life others have made.

Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

War is the greatest plague that can afflict mankind... Any scourge is preferable to it.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.

This world... ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life.

Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.

I must refuse to believe that the Germans contemplate with equanimity the evacuation of cities like London for fear of destruction to be wrought by man's inhuman ingenuity.

The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether-Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.

The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder, - and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

It was a pleasure to burn.

The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

We can destroy only as creators

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

There is more than one way to burn a book.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.

What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.

Where once stood the steadfast pines, great, beautiful, sweet, my hand touched raw, moist stumps. All about lay broken branches, like the antlers of stricken deer. The fragrant, piled-up sawdust swirled and tumbled about me. An unreasoning resentment flashed through me at the ruthless destruction of the beauty that I love.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

What is it about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?...The thing man wanted to invent, but never did...If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledygook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy.

I see neither bravery nor sacrifice in destroying life or property, for offense or defense.

Air power may either end war or end civilization.

I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin.

There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.

To rule by knowledge ravages the country.

Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.

The wolf is the arch type of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation.

And thou, all-shaking thunder,Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at onceThat makes ingrateful man!

The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.

There's something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.