Quotes About Destruction

No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.

Many of the rioters were obviously bourgeois, the scions of privileged families, as have been the leaders of so many destructive movements in modern history. That same evening, I dined in an expensive restaurant and saw there a fellow diner whom I had observed a few hours before joyfully heaving a brick through a window. How much destruction did he think his country could bear before his own life might be affected, his own existence compromised?

They brought even their goats with them; and one goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish.

Havana is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction.

The work of cultural destruction, while often swifter, easier, and more self-conscious than that of construction, is not the work of a moment. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.

Sin is a viper that does always kill where it is not killed.

Nay is it not rather the very murkiness, and atmospheric suffocation, that brings the lightning and the light? The new Evangel, as the old had been, was it to be born in the Destruction of a World?

At the heart of each of these mass atrocities, he argues, was a state-building project in which traitorous inconvenient minorities were perceived as a threat and ultimately were destroyed.

I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.

Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.

Boko Haram, by itself, has destroyed large areas in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger.

There is a path one takes when moving toward destruction. Like someone who has one drink on a Friday night, and two the next, only to gradually and completely lose control

there were people who added goodness to the world and people who lived to destroy it.

that there were people who added goodness to the world and people who lived to destroy it.

for the back half of the hurricane still lies in wait and with it, sometimes even greater destruction. Which

Storing genes, vulnerable informational systems, in the immediate vicinity of the mitochondrial respiratory chains, which leak destructive free radicals, is equivalent to storing a valuable library in the wooden shack of a registered pyromaniac.

Of the two thousand original copies printed of The History of Love, some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were shredded to pulp along with other unread or unwanted books, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine's spinning blades.

I supposed the Red Guards had enjoyed themselves. Is it not true that we all possess some destructive tendencies in our nature? The veneer of civilization is very thin. Underneath lurks the animal in each of us. If I were young and had had a working class background, if I had been brought up to worship Mao and taught to believe him infalliable, would I not have behaved exactly as the Red Guards had done?

The poet Tao Yuan-ming (A.D. 376 - 427) used the lotus to represent a man of honor in a famous poem, saying that the lotus rose out of mud but remained unstained. [. . .] Perhaps the poet was too idealistic, I thought as I listened to the laughter of the Red Guards overhead. They seemed to be blissfully happy in their work of destruction because they were sure they were doing something to satisfy their God, Mao Zedong.

In 1755 one of the worst natural disasters of the eighteenth century occurred: the Lisbon earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people. This Portuguese city was devastated not just by the earthquake, but also by the tsunami that followed, and then by fires that raged for days.

Years hence it will be possible for nations to fight without armies, ships or guns, by weapons far more terrible, to the destructive action and range of which there is virtually no limit. A city, at any distance whatsoever from the enemy, can be destroyed by him and no power on earth can stop him from doing so.

I didn't know. I was fully aware of what would be destroyed. I did not know what would be built out of the ruins. No one can know that with any degree of certainty, I thought. The world is tangible, solid, we live in it and are struggling with it every moment it exist. The world of the future is not yet born

ABAD'DON, noun [Hebrew Chaldee Syriac Samaritan to be lost, or destroyed, to perish.] 1. The destroyer, or angel of the bottomless pit. Revelation 9. 2. The bottomless pit. Milton.

People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.