Destructiveness Quotes

• l know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

  Douglas MacArthur

  Peace, Military, War

  "Duty, Honor, Country: Two Memorable Addresses".

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Integrity, Selfish, Creativity

  Martin Luther King Jr. (1963). “Strength to Love”

  131 Copy quote

  Show source

• Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Life, Natural, Sadistic

  Wilhelm Reich (1948). “Entdeckung Des Orgons”

  64 Copy quote

  Show source

• I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Military, War, Men

  16 Copy quote

• Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.

  Erich Fromm

  Life, Outcomes

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics”, p.222, Open Road Media

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.

  Daniel Quinn

  Life, Men, Greed

  Daniel Quinn (2009). “Ishmael: A Novel”, p.83, Bantam

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.

  Erich Fromm

  Boredom, Recognition, Found

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.400, Open Road Media

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is only one answer to destructiveness and that is creativity.

  Sylvia Ashton-Warner

  Creativity, Answers

  Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1986). “Teacher”, p.96, Simon and Schuster

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain.

  Anais Nin

  Crush, Hurt, June

  5 Copy quote

• For me, the entire journey of Lost has been walking that fine line between discovering Sawyer's humanity and, yet, keeping his edge of anger and destructiveness. He's been through every situation possible, emotionally and physically. Sometimes, it's been scary to get in touch with his growth, especially his relationship with Juliet. I really thought the audience might reject the softer side of Sawyer we saw in that. As for what will happen with him and Kate, all I can say is they have a love that is undeniable, but maybe it must be denied.

  Josh Holloway

  Journey, Scary, Humanity

  7 Copy quote

• I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think it can also mean self-reflection and poetic sensiblity. It can mean empathy, hedonism, a libertarianism.

  Courtney Love

  Rap, Mean, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed-he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?

  Erich Fromm

  Spiritual, Jesus, Revenge

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Escape from Freedom”, p.11, Open Road Media

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Look hard for ways to make little moves against destructiveness.

  Andre Trocme

  Moving, Looks, Littles

  50 Copy quote

• Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

  Theodor Adorno

  Emotional, Democracy, Source

  Theodor W. Adorno, Samuel H. Flowerman (1964). “The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice”

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not true that evil, destructiveness , and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that we are daily producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is absolutely avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to this production of evil.

  Alice Miller

  Ocean, Ignorance, Evil

  Alice Miller (2012). “Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries”, p.139, Anchor

  69 Copy quote

  Show source

• For the other end of the spectrum, the 50 to 85 percent of the world's population who are not the recipients of privilege, the world they know is almost certainly worse than any their earlier counterparts knew. It is likely they are worse off materially, despite the technological changes. In substantive as opposed to formal terms, they are more, not less, subject to arbitrary constraints, since the central mechanisms are more pervasive and more efficient. And they bear the brunt of the various kinds of psychic malaise, as well as of the destructiveness of civil wars.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  War, Psychics, Technological Change

  30 Copy quote

• Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  War, Hands, Civilization

  6 Copy quote

• In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

  Leo Rosten

  Fear, Book, Dark

  Leo Calvin Rosten (1959). “The return of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war. A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.

  Douglas MacArthur

  War, Discovery, Civilization

  Radio Broadcast to the Nation Following the USS Missouri Surrender Ceremony, delivered 2 September 1945, USS Missouri, Tokyo Bay, Japan

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• I see the mind of the five-year-old as a volcano with two vents: destructiveness and creativeness.

  Sylvia Ashton-Warner

  Teacher, Years, Two

  23 Copy quote

• The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon [the 'Super', i.e. the hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these reasons, we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public and the world what we think is wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon.

  Enrico Fermi

  Believe, Thinking, Light

  47 Copy quote

• The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.

  Erich Fromm

  Stronger, Outcomes, Life Is

  Erich Fromm (1941). “Escape from Freedom”, Henry Holt & Company

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.

  Bill McKibben

  Suicidal, Thinking, Self

  Source: theotherjournal.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly.

  Keith Ablow

  Self, Sometimes, Produce

  8 Copy quote

• Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.

  Adrienne Rich

  Eye, Self, Survival

  4 Copy quote