Annihilation Quotes

• To me our bombing policy appears to be suicidal. Not because it does not do vast damage to our enemy, it does; but because, simultaneously, it does vast damage to our peace aim, unless that aim is mutual economic and social annihilation.

  J. F. C. Fuller

  Suicide, Suicidal, Enemy

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• Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.

  Anton Chekhov

  Self, Selfishness, Calculating

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• If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

  Albert Camus

  Nature, Real, Blood

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.44, Vintage

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• My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.

  Thom Gunn

  Confused, Aids, My Thoughts

  "In Time Of Plague". Poem by Thom Gunn, www.theguardian.com. 1992.

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• It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented - and unprecedentedly profitable - effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race.

  L. Neil Smith

  Race, Effort, Genocide

  "How Many Americans Does It Take to Change a Dim Bulb?". L. Neil Smith's remarks to the Second Annual Freedom Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, www.lneilsmith.org. October 12-13, 2002.

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• The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.

  Winifred Holtby

  Life, Understanding, Crowns

  Winifred Holtby (2007). “Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir”, Bloomsbury Academic

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• A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

  Elie Wiesel

  Men, Genocide, Destruction

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• We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.

  Adlai E. Stevenson

  Love, Peace, Nature

  Speech to Economic and Social Council of United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, 9 July 1965

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• Believing that the power to destroy belongs to the Creator alone I affirm... that any theory which, when carried out, demands the annihilation of force, is necessarily erroneous.

  James Prescott Joule

  Believe, Demand, Genocide

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• Many people believe that the current system must inevitably end in total annihilation. They reject, sometimes very emotionally, any attempts to analyze this notion.

  Herman Kahn

  Believe, People, Sometimes

  Herman Kahn, Paul Dragoș Aligică, Kenneth R. Weinstein (2009). “The Essential Herman Kahn: In Defense of Thinking”, p.17, Lexington Books

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• I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. 'Please don't take away our precious Soviet Union! - We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!'

  Craig Reucassel

  Stupid, Europe, People

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• Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.

  Sun Tzu

  War, Fall, People

  Sun Tzu (2005). “The Art of War”, p.169, Shambhala Publications

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• If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, War, Self

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.44, New World Library

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• Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.

  Mark Twain

  Years, Together, Remember

  Autobiography ch. 49 (1959)

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• It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a state in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

  Winston Churchill

  Brother, Children, War

  Winston Churchill (1961). “The Unwritten Alliance: Speeches 1953 to 1959”

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• But we have reason to think that the annihilation of work is no less a physical impossibility than its creation, that is, than perpetual motion.

  Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet

  Hard Work, Thinking, Reason

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• Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

  Mark Twain

  Death, Grateful, Grief

  Autobiography ch. 49 (1959)

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• Only one thing can conquer war-that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Peace, Attitude, War

  Ludwig von Mises (2013). “The Theory of Money and Credit”, p.394, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Nature abhors annihilation.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Nature, Philosophical, Genocide

  "De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the ends of good and evil)". Book by Marcus Tullius Cicero (Book V: Liber Quintus, Chapter 11, Section 3), 45 BC.

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• Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Love, Hate, War

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1968). “I Have a Dream: The Quotations of Martin Luther King, Jr”

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• Probably the simplest hypothesis... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter.

  Arthur Eddington

  May, Matter, Genocide

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• Present annual world energy consumption is about equal to the annihilation energy of 4 tons of matter.

  Bernard M. Oliver

  Energy, World, Matter

  Bernard M. Oliver, Len Cutler (1997). “The Selected Papers of Bernard M. Oliver”

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• The existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion.

  Johann Most

  People, Enemy, Genocide

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• The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

  Simone Weil

  Truth, Dwelling, Long

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.27, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Hate, Science, Men

  Frankenstein ch. 10 (1818)

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