Quotes About Destruction

They burnt down the whole palace and they laughed menacingly. The shadows of the dreams and memories they burnt alive walked all over the ruins, trying to hold on to the charred pieces of their body.

School's out forever, school's been blown to pieces.

We never left a set until we'd trashed it.

War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.

God may promise not to destroy creation, but it is not a promise humankind made - to our peril.

I can't breathe, she said. I feel like I'm drowning in a gray sea, like they're flooding the whole city, washing away our past and people, dashing everything from the face of the earth. Jammed

I praise my destroyer, and will continue praising until hours run like mercury through my fingers, hope flares a final time in the last throes of innocence, and all the coins of sense are spent.

Kiddush ha-Shem, the principle of service to God, acquired a new definition in the Ghetto, where it became the struggle to preserve life in the face of destruction.

One of Frank's key tasks was to kill all people of influence, such as teachers, priests, landowners, politicians, lawyers, and artists. Then he began rearranging huge masses of the population: over a span of five years, 860,000 Poles would be uprooted and resettled; 75,000 Germans would take over their lands; 1,300,000 Poles would be shipped to Germany as slave labor; and 330,000 would simply be shot. With

What Himmler planned as a gift-wrapped massacre became a siege lasting nearly a month, until at last the Germans decided to torch everything—buildings, bunkers, sewers, and all the people in them.

This is why one must be careful with life, her father had said, in very controlled wrath. Death is the most hateful thing. Don't allow the destruction of what you can never restore.

a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction.

But that's why you built the towers, isn't it? Weren't the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is clear. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It's a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures.

We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as "the common good". The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a nation we are incapable of more.

We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as "the common good".

what in God's name was the thrust of that vast expanse of displaced water doing to those stones and to the centuries-old binding that kept them in place? Suddenly the air was unbreathable as a capricious gust blew the ship's exhaust down on them for a few seconds.

What fools men are to raze a city, destroying tombs, and temples, and sacred places, when they are so soon to die themselves.

Revenge, that deformed child of justice, fed itself with blind desire, incapable of seeing what was ahead, caring nothing about means or method, about what it left destroyed in its wake.

I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame.

Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.