Quotes About Destruction

For as fashionable as cynicism always was, the truth was that when it came to basic human responsibility, people rose to the challenge. Pretty much always. As many times as Hell had been created, history stood as indisputable proof that the mass of humanity was good. People built more than they burned, created more than they destroyed, not by a little but by a massive surplus. To know

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. —Robert Frost

She said, "'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…'" She parted the curtains, looked out at the brick wall opposite and the street below. "Never really understood the poem, but I like the way the words taste.

The glass wall behind must have blown out as well, four stories of lethal shards surfing the roar of air and fire.

Every step stranger. The bones of buildings had torn through their stone skin and lay exposed. Collapsed walls buried the cobblestones. Shattered glass dusted the scene with razor-edged glitter. The dust clouds were lit brighter by a dozen fires burning out of sight.

We are never more clever than in the creation of ways to destroy ourselves.

Almost everyone has an inborn need to create; in most people this is thwarted and forgotten, and the drive is pushed into other activities that are less threatening, less difficult, and less rewarding. In some people, that need to create is transmuted into the need to destroy.

The war continues with no sign that it will end [...]. It's like an avalanche, started by a single gunshot, but which roars down the mountain more loudly than a thousand canons.

When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself.

God, if she considered it, seemed awfully cruel and violent, blowing people's houses down, washing out the coastline. Such a God, Allison was sure, would have to be a man, and not a particularly nice one.

that much gold, and great store of riches makes them mad, insomuch as they endeavour to destroy each other...

In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped mens bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.

We're a rather dreary generation on the whole, aren't we? We don't create much beauty of our own, and our one idea seems to be to smash up everybody else's creations.

In Yellowstone National Park, human-imposed stability thwarted for many years the natural process of small fires, which regularly clean out brush and dead trees. The result was a fragile equilibrium completely vulnerable to the cataclysm of fire that destroyed large areas of the park. The attempt to manage for stability and to enforce an unnatural equilibrium always leads to far-reaching destruction. The

The war was not on that map, and neither was the surrender... that makes me happy and sad— happy because I know the streams will keep streaming and the skies will keep clouding and clearing, even as people fight and tear and claw at each other... what we do makes me sad too because what difference do we make? Looking around me, at all the graves and leftover destruction— seems we just keep on messing up a darned good thing.

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

we are affirming our trust that creation means well within us all, and that whatever painful growth and change may lie ahead, it is leading us to Life, not destruction

Certain women because of their female power and seductiveness could bring destruction to a family.

every time a bomb exploded, every anti-personnel weapon that sent its hundreds of particles tearing through the sift tissues of soft bodies, every helicopter that was shot down with its crew, every plane hit with a missile: brrrring, brrrring, on the great cash register in the homeland bank. It was all profit. It would have to be replaced. It was the perfect form of fantastically expensive and forced consumption, paid for by taxes.

they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.

If we are lucky, we gradually gain an appreciation for how destruction can give rise to unprecedented forms of vitality, how our capacity to survive distress leaves behind a smoldering residue that we can draw on to constitute empowering life narratives. Although the process of living is perhaps inherently damaging, we can learn to make use of this damage—the same way that we can learn to make use of accidents—to generate more vigorous forms of life.

People never think, until it happens to their place, that all construction is destruction. The whole planet is paved in the dead, who are ignored so the living can dig their foundations.

Violent love eats up what it does love, and is mere appetite.