Annihilation Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• War traumatizes soldier and civilian alike; warfare is a profit-making racket; warfare resolves nothing that negotiations can't resolve better; the weapons we have now make non-violence the only option to planetary annihilation.

  Madeline Taylor

  War, Soldier, Weapons

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• We all have choices. We can build walls or we can build bridges. We can give our talents to creating weapons of annihilation, as so many scientists have done, or we can work to find solutions to humanities greatest problems. Our orientation is found not only in our acts, but also in the policies we support or oppose.

  David Krieger

  Wall, Bridges, Creating

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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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• Let me repeat that: Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down. Get used to that. When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus.

  Charles Eisenstein

  Powerful, Civilization, Gains

  Charles Eisenstein (2013). “The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self”, p.209, North Atlantic Books

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• There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

  David Lehman

  Air, Criticism, Lasts

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peace, Community, Choices

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• It is a new intoxication - annihilation. It multiplies every emotion.

  Edwin Balmer

  Emotion, Apocalypse, Intoxication

  Philip Wylie, Edwin Balmer (2016). “When Worlds Collide”, p.97, Macmillan

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• NIRVANA- In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise enough to understand it.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Wise, Buddhist, Religion

  Ambrose Bierce (2009). “The Devil's Dictionary: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.203, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Our future on this planet, exposed as it is to nuclear annihilation, depends one one single factor: humanity must make a moral about-face.

  Pope John Paul II

  Peace, Ubuntu, Humanity

  Pope John Paul II (1981). “The Far East Journey of Peace and Brotherhood”, Pauline Books & Media

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• There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.

  Vilayat Inayat Khan

  Dark, Night, Soul

  Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan (1999). “Awakening: A Sufi Experience”, Tarcher

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• I think most generations tend to learn the lesson of war the hard way. There is a deep attraction to the empowerment. Freud is right: societies either become locked in a collective embrace of Eros, as individuals do, or a collective embrace of Thanatos, the death instinct. They swing between the two. The notion that societies are naturally prone toward self-preservation is wrong. Self-annihilation can be deeply addictive, intoxicating, enticing. So I take a darker view of human nature, that war is probably always going to be with us. I think history bears me out.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Thinking, Self

  "Addicted to War: A Conversation with Chris Hedges". Interview with Metta Spencer, peacemagazine.org. April-June 2007.

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• A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.

  Immanuel Kant

  Lying, Men, Dignity

  Immanuel Kant (1836). “The Metaphysic of Ethics”, p.267

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• I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think.

  Henry Miller

  Running, Stars, Eye

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• The gaps in power, the gaps in wealth, the gaps in ideology which hold the nations apart also make up the abyss into which mankind can fall to annihilation.

  Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

  Fall, Gaps, Wealth

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• The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

  Ernest Becker

  Inspirational Life, Men, Anxiety

  Ernest Becker (2007). “The Denial of Death”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

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• And I can’t let you out of here until I know what your plans are. (Kat) To stop the annihilation of mankind and the earth. It’s a simple plan, really, but an important one. Can I go now? (Sin)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Simple, Important, Earth

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2009). “Devil May Cry”, p.31, Hachette UK

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• I’m a goddess of destruction. Tell me honestly that you find nothing exciting about the idea of a billion people screaming out for mercy when there’s no one left who cares what befalls them. Of the entire earth being rained on by all manner of demons bent on ultimate torture and sacrifice. Them ripping and shredding human flesh as they claw in a drunken frenzy fueled by their hatred of everything. Drinking blood in an orgy of terror...ahhh, the beauty of annihilation. There’s nothing like it.(Apollymi)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Drinking, Sacrifice, Blood

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2007). “Devil May Cry: A Dark-Hunter Novel”, p.56, Macmillan

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• It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Ambition, Reality, Views

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2009). “Frankenstein: Easyread Edition”, p.42, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• But it is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Baby, Taken, Hands

  J. M. Coetzee (2017). “Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel”, p.19, Penguin

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