Destructive Quotes

• Photo © Michel Delsol

  One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approachings of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn’t matter if you’re rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn’t change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable for ever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.

  Kathy Acker

  Real, Believe, Tears

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• The poor suffer twice at the rioter's hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood; second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Hands, Suffering, Atmosphere

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• The truth of God may well be likened to a narrow path skirted on either side by a dangerous and destructive precipice: in other words, it lies between two gulfs of error.

  Arthur W. Pink

  Lying, Errors, Two

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• Everything you stand for, believe in, experience and aspire to is the result of thought. And thought is destructive because it is nothing more than a protective mechanism, programmed to protect its own interests at all costs.

  U.G. Krishnamurti

  Believe, Cost, Results

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• Our material eye cannot see that a stupid chauvinism is driving us from one noisy, destructive, futile agitation to another.

  Anne Sullivan Macy

  Stupid, Eye, Agitation

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• Conscious choice is creative. Unconscious choice is destructive. That is how we end up living other people's lives.

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Women, People, Choices

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• You know what the most destructive force in the universe is?  Regret.

  Tommy Lee

  Regret, Force, Knows

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• Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

  Salvador Dali

  Photography, Vision, Shackles

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• I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil.

  Andrew Solomon

  Growing Up, Gay, Self

  Source: andrewsolomon.com

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• The problem with life is, we often do things that will ultimately be self-destructive and make us unhappy, yet in that moment it seems like the best idea in the world. You have to be careful of moments - they're tricksy things.

  Sophie Dahl

  Self, Ideas, Unhappy

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• Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Color, Romance, Taste

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• My story is really an affirmation of my strength and my luck. To live with a great artist like Ted Hughes or Mick Jagger is a very, very destructive role for a woman trying to be herself. In fact, it can't be done.

  Marianne Faithfull

  Artist, Luck, Trying

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• There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

  Erich Fromm

  Spiritual, Envy, Feelings

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics”, p.235, Routledge

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• America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.

  John W. Gardner

  Freedom, Commitment, Greatness

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• I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office.

  Newt Gingrich

  Running, Country, Thinking

  "CNN’s John King stands by his first debate question to Newt Gingrich". Interview With John King, cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com. January 20, 2012.

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• I had the honor to meet Nelson Mandela, and I heard him explain his forgiveness of his captors of 27 years by saying hatred and bitterness is destructive - the power is in love and forgiveness.

  Dick Gephardt

  Years, Hatred, Honor

  "Sen. Richard Gephardt's Speech Text". abcnews.go.com. August 16.

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• I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Science, Literature, Logic

  Arthur Conan Doyle (2016). “The Sign of the Four”, p.21, Arthur Conan Doyle

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• Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.

  Mary Douglas

  Moral, Pretension, Superiority

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• The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

  Ernest Dimnet

  Inspirational, Happiness, Happy

  "What We Live by". Book by Ernest Dimnet, p. 238, 1932.

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• Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

  Norman Cousins

  Peace, War, World

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• To understand something changing form as a destructive act is a very modern, Western gut reaction to things, and I get it. But what I'm suggesting is nothing radical, this notion of things constantly changing, and that the change is not inherently destructive.

  Dario Robleto

  Things Change, Modern, Reactions

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.

  Nicolas Cage

  Acting, Energy, Way

  "'You've got to be able to break the wall'". Interview with Dorian Lynskey, www.theguardian.com. February 16, 2007.

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• I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

  A. S. Byatt

  Book, Writing, People

  "Writing in terms of pleasure". Interview with Sam Leith, www.theguardian.com. April 24, 2009.

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• Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.

  Albert Bandura

  Powerful, Fall, Mean

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