destruction Quotes

“As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.”

“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”

“Destroying things is much easier than making them.”

Nature’s creative power is far beyond man’s instinct of destruction.

Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.

“Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.”

“It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! it’s all over.”

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have.

“The application of force alone, without support based on a spiritual concept, can never bring about the destruction of an idea or arrest the propagation of it, unless one is ready and able to ruthlessly to exterminate the last upholders of that idea even to a man, and also wipe out any tradition which it may tend to leave behind.”

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history’s fingers, down it goes.

“Our churches, known the world over for their idiosyncratic beauty, for their brightly colored spires and improbable cupolas, we raze one by one. We topple the statues of old heroes and strip their names from the streets, as if they had been figments of our imagination. Our poets we either silence, or wait patiently for them to silence themselves.”

“The war has ruined us for everything.”

“The ideals of anarchism were perfect for me. I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world. I thought that big corporations were running the world (which I now know they do) and by supporting them, I was condoning their evil ways (which is true, but a girl’s gotta put gas in her car).”

“She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro down its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet. In a sweeping passion she seized a glass vase from the table and flung it upon the tiles of the hearth. She wanted to destroy something. The crash and clatter were what she wanted to hear.”

“They found combat to be ugliness, destruction and death and hated it. Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands on the body-anything that is, except letting down their buddies.”

“Formalist and Hypocrisy also arrived at the foot of the hill. They paused to consider the hill and how steep and high it was, as well as the fact that there were two alternative ways to go. They assumed that these two easier ways would meet up with the narrow way on the other side of the hill and decided to each choose one of the alternative roads. The name of one of those roads was Danger and the name of the other Destruction. So one turned to take the way called Danger, which led him into vast woods and the other took the way to Destruction, which led him into a wide field full of dark mountains where he stumbled and fell, never to rise again.”

“All the same, he’s been making a mess of things. Every time he breathes, horrible things come out of his mouth: Little green frogs. Drops of blood. Chocolates wrapped in pretty foil, but with poisonous centers that give off a foul odor each time he breaks one in half. He’s wrecking things just by snapping his fingers. He’s making things fall apart.”

“The recipe for fun is pretty simple raising boys: add to any activity an element of danger, stir in a little exploration, add a dash of destruction, and you’ve got yourself a winner.”

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

“For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage. . . Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time.”

“George: Be careful, Martha…I’ll rip you to pieces. Martha: You aren’t man enough…you haven’t the guts. George: Total war? Martha: Total.”

“George: “And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must…eventually…fall.”

“George: We got a telegram; there was a car accident, and he’s dead. POUF! … Martha: (A howl which weakens into a moan) NOOOOOOoooooo.”

“What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.”

“They met in the wide park of the land. Enkidu held fast the door with his foot, and permitted not Gilgamish to enter. They grappled with each other goring like an ox. The threshold they destroyed.”

“A prolonged war finally destroys the victors too,”

“They ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for their enemies to destroy them.”

“Your business and your life will change when you really, really get it that some people are not going to change, no matter what you do, and that still others have a vested interest in being destructive.”

“Not Helen’s face, nor Paris, was in fault; But by the gods was this destruction brought.”

“You are scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Do you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent, man.”

“You don’t have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.”

“This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated.”

“And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.”

″‘It’s like you said the other day,’ said Adam. ‘You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s all full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hang-in’ about for millions of years. ’Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion.‘”

“It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.”

“Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world of Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civilization.”

“Ay me! I see the ruin of my house. The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind.”

“The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”

“Some tale-tellers say the Beams saved it; others say they are the seeds of the world’s destruction. ”

“Secrets tear you apart.”

“Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”

“Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing?”

“All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down”

“When his land burned, when his home was destroyed, it was assumed that he had burned himself and the Cup to ashes rather than relinquish either to the Clave. His bones were found in the ashes, along with the bones of his wife.”

“Better to have it vanish suddenly, in a blaze of glory, than fall into gradual disrepair and dilapidation. There is no more melancholy spectacle than a festal hall, the morning after the banquet, when the guests have departed and the lights are extinguished.”

“I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage.”

“Medea: how I bless you both… not here—beyond… every blessing here you father has despoiled.”

“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”

“Let every veil of deception spread over America be destroyed.”

“He bent down, clawing blindly and found, finally, their smashed remains. A minor, indirect destruction stemming from the sudden, wholesale smashing of a city. But the only one that greatly interested Henry Bemis. He stared down at the blurred page before him. He began to cry.”

“There was a storm of pancakes one morning and a downpour of maple syrup that nearly flooded the town.”

There are many different messages in the book e.g the the destruction of the environment and even the dangers of global warming, the horrors of dictatorship and many more.

“Dancing dinosaurs broke up the roads.”

“He could feel the force now very strong, very close, all around, the air was thick with it; outside the church was destruction and chaos, the heart of the Dark, and he could think of nothing that he could do to turn it aside.”

“Everyone had a story about a family member who’d had to go in to hiding, or a friend who’d been dragged off to a concentration camp, or a house that had been destroyed by a bomb. Then they moved on to rumours about the war- about Patton, the American general who was making such good progress on the Western Front...”

″‘It’s about those owls.’ ‘Sure.’ ‘What’s gonna happen to them?’ Officer Delinko asked. ‘Once you start bulldozing, I mean.’ Curly the foreman chuckled. He thought the policeman must be kidding. ‘What owls?’ he said.”

″‘How would you and Mom like it,’ Roy pressed on, ‘if a bunch of strangers showed up one day with bulldozers to flatten this house? And all they had to say was ‘Don’t worry, Mr. and Mrs. Eberhardt, it’s no big deal. Just pack up and move to another place.’ How would you feel about that?‘”

“Some of the women cried at the sight of her, and I saw men, my father included, with tears in their eyes. It didn’t seem possible that only a few hours before I had been standing on her deck. I was no longer excited about the war; I had begun to understand that it meant death and destruction.”

“All destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure.”

“I don’t know how it has come to this. But I do know that it started with him coming here. Moving into the third floor. Benjamin Daniels. He destroyed everything.”

Nay worse, he dared not mingle with the herd—he must hide himself, for he was one marked out for destruction.

“He would take pretty little imitation lemons, such as are now being shipped into Russia, handy for carrying in the pockets, and strong enough to blow a whole temple out of sight.”

“Not merely the value of the lives and the material that it destroys,

So we have, at the present moment, a society with, say, thirty per cent of the population occupied in producing useless articles, and one per cent occupied in destroying them.

In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry, the tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried through the leagues of rock, the slab was slowly raised and fitted in the roof, the rope was rove to it and slowly taken through the miles of hollow to the great iron ring. All being made ready with much labour, and the hour come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and the sharpened axe that was to sever the rope from the great iron ring was put into his hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and the ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work, near and afar, that tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.