Destructive Quotes - Page 4

• Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.

  Janet Fitch

  Girl, Rain, Gun

  Janet Fitch (2013). “Paint It Black”, p.120, Hachette UK

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• Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

  Derrick Jensen

  Running, Believe, Government

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• Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.

  Ian Mcewan

  Football, Children, Stupid

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• I've learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger: it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage--self destructive, destroy the world rage--and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.

  Sidney Poitier

  Self, Flames, Trying

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• True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.

  Pope John Paul II

  Peace, Attitude, Names

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• Every once in a while you just have to decide to do something very crazy and very right--just to dare yourself to live. I don't mean doing something stupid and destructive--just something fun and good and beautiful.

  Regina Doman

  Beautiful, Fun, Crazy

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• The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

  Anais Nin

  Fear, Men, People

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• I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

  Arthur Miller

  Work, Believe, Mean

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• The illness of a doctor is always worse than the illnesses of his patients.The patients only feel, but the doctor, as well as feeling, has a pretty good idea of the destructive effect of the disease on his constitution.This is a case in which knowledge brings death nearer.

  Maxim Gorky

  Doctors, Ideas, Feelings

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• It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he's right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness. (p. 146)

  Marilynne Robinson

  Religious, Atheist, Self

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• The symbol of all art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism, into the secret glories which it contains.

  e. e. cummings

  Art, Light, White

  "Tulips and Chimneys".

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• I don't want to point out her flaws, but if I see her going on a self-destructive path, isn't it up to me as her friend to stop her?

  Simone Elkeles

  Self, Want, Path

  Simone Elkeles (2011). “Perfect Chemistry”, p.122, Simon and Schuster

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• I believe that human brilliance manifests itself only in flashes, among rare individuals. For this reason, humanity as a whole is enormously destructive: the creation of something as devastating as Western culture, which is now allowed to spread throughout the world, offers sufficient proof of this fact.

  Pentti Linkola

  Believe, Humanity, Western Culture

  Pentti Linkola (2011). “Can Life Prevail?”, p.133, Arktos

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• She wasn't as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she'd slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts.

  Ann Brashares

  Bees, Ghost, Dramatic

  Ann Brashares (2012). “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection”, p.228, Delacorte Press

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• Surely, if it is the right of the people to "alter or abolish," it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. This principle, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, or attacks those values, it is being unpatriotic.

  Howard Zinn

  Country, Lying, Believe

  Howard Zinn (2013). “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress”, p.112, City Lights Books

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• The Destructive Arts are exactly like Martial Arts, except they don't have uniforms or usefulness and the end result doesn't resemble art in any way.

  Jim Benton

  Art, Uniforms, Way

  Jim Benton (2013). “Dear Dumb Diary #11: Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers”, p.10, Scholastic

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• and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.

  Stephen King

  Hate, Thinking, World

  Stephen King, Michael Whelan (2004). “The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower”, p.141, Simon and Schuster

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• When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.

  Rob Bell

  Spiritual, Angel, Animal

  Rob Bell (2010). “Sex God”, p.41, Harper Collins

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• Part of abandoning the all-or-nothing mentality is allowing yourself room for setbacks. We are bound to have lapses on the road to health and wellness, but it is critical that we learn how to handle small failures positively so that we can minimize their long-term destructive effects. One setback is one setback—it is not the end of the world, nor is it the end of your journey toward a better you.

  Jillian Michaels

  Journey, Long, Self Improvement

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• We are all prone to brood on the evil done us. That brooding becomes as a gnawing and destructive canker. Is there a virtue more in need of application in our time than the virtue of forgiving and forgetting? There are those who would look upon this as a sign of weakness. Is it? I submit that it takes neither strength nor intelligence to brood in anger over wrongs suffered, to go through life with a spirit of vindictiveness, to dissipate one’s abilities in planning retribution. There is no peace in the nursing of a grudge. There is no happiness in living for the day when you can ‘get even.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Nursing, Evil, Forgiving

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• I know. So, I was angry with you. I didn't know why. I was angry with the world. I did know why. I hated all my therapists for being useless. I was this little ball of self-destructive fury, and none of them could do anything but tell me that I was a little ball of self-destructive fury. [...] I knew I was angry. Tell me what to do with that anger, please.

  Gayle Forman

  Self, Balls, Useless

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• No, my dear, I'm not in love with you, no more than you are with me, and if I were, you would be the last person I'd ever tell. God help the man who ever really loves you. You'd break his heart, my darling, cruel, destructive little cat who is so careless and confident she doesn't even trouble to sheathe her claws.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Love You, Heart, Cat

  Margaret Mitchell (2016). “Gone with the Wind”, p.544, Hamilton Books

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• A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.

  Thomas Merton

  Reality, Destiny, Men

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.31, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.

  Peter Shaffer

  Mother, Real, Kids

  Peter Shaffer (2011). “Equus”, p.79, Simon and Schuster

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• Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Believe, Slaughterhouse Five, Facts

  "Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death". Book by Kurt Vonnegut (Chapter 5, p. 129), 1969.

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