Self Destruction Quotes - Page 4

• I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

  Saint Augustine

  Fall, Mean, Self

  Saint Augustine, Henry Chadwick (2008). “The Confessions”, p.29, Oxford Paperbacks

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• All parents want their offspring to be exemplars of virtue and achievement and happiness. But most of all, we want desperately for you to be safe - safe from disease and violence and self-destruction.

  Estelle Ramey

  Self, Achievement, Parent

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• The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Silly, Self, Irony

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• But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

  John Irving

  War, Believe, Self

  John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

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• Sense (for a particular art, science, human being, and so forth) is divided spirit; self-restraint is consequently the result of self-creation and self-destruction.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Art, Self, Spirit

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• I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

  Iris Murdoch

  Hate, Self, Soul

  "Under the Net".

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• Thus another friendship was dashed on the cruel rocks amid the storm of my self-destruction.

  Russell Brand

  Rocks, Self, Storm

  Russell Brand (2009). “My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in self-abuse, especially in self-medication and self-destruction.

  Thomas Szasz

  War, Self, Two

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1990). “The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary”, Open Court Publishing Company

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• Without love the acquisition of knowledge only increases confusion and leads to self-destruction.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Knowledge, Self, Confusion

  "Education and the Significance of Life". Book by Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1953.

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• Procrastination is the seed of self destruction.

  Matthew Burton

  Procrastination, Self, Destruction

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• Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.

  Russell Brand

  Self, Loathing, Talent

  Russell Brand (2008). “My Booky Wook”, p.188, Hachette UK

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• If the world does not change course, we risk self-destruction.

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  Self, Risk, Doe

  "Saving Ourselves From Self-Destruction" by Mohamed ElBaradei, www.nytimes.com. February 12, 2004.

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• Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Peace, War, Self

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

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• I've finally tapped into that spirit of self-destruction that makes rock-n-roll the king of music!

  Homer

  Kings, Rocks, Self

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• Become one with eternity.
  Become part of your environment.
  Take off your clothes.
  Forget yourself. Make love.
  Self-destruction is the only
  way to peace.

  Yayoi Kusama

  Self, Clothes, Making Love

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• In one degree or another we all struggle with selfishness. Since it is so common, why worry about selfishness anyway? Because selfishness is really self-destruction in slow motion.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Struggle, Self, Worry

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• Revenge can only be found on the road to self-destruction.

  Wayne Gerard Trotman

  Revenge, Self, Destruction

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• We are hurtling towards self-destruction at an alarming rate thanks chiefly to an advertising and propaganda system that goads people from infancy towards apathy, isolation, passivity, helplessness and separation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Self, People, Apathy

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• If you want to save the snow leopard, or the giant Redwoods, or the Okavango delta, or the Amazon, or the atmosphere, or the Earth, or those you love, or yourself, or the human race, this is the only path that can achieve that-so the truth is the sooner you support and adopt this path of transformation through understanding the better. The choice is self-destruction or self-discovery.

  Jeremy Griffith

  Race, Discovery, Self

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• He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual's armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world's chaos and warfare.

  Gay Talese

  Pain, Block, Frustration

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• It is very easy to see the allure of alcohol to dull the prain and the temptation to punish myself for something that is not my fault. But he sobering truth is that if I step onto the path of self-destruction, I know I will never come back.

  Bill Jenkins

  Grief, Self, Alcohol

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• Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction. He sees that in this nuclear age vast new industrial complexes enable man to produce in one hour that which he labored over for years in the past, but he also realizes that these same industries have disturbed the ecological balance and, through air and noise pollution, have contaminated his own milieu.

  Henri Nouwen

  Past, Men, Air

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• I'm an experimental artist in a field that doesn't celebrate experimentation. It celebrates self-destruction, which I guess you could say is a creative endeavor.

  Billy Corgan

  Artist, Self, Creative

  "A Conversation With Billy Corgan Part II". Interview with Sharon London, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending.

  Lewis Henry Morgan

  Wisdom, Rights, Government

  Lewis Henry Morgan, Leslie A. White (1959). “The Indian Journals, 1859-62”, p.12, Courier Corporation

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• The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of nature. But if we keep at it and keep alive, we are in for one surprise after another. We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never heard before, music never heard before.

  Lewis Thomas

  Persistence, Self, Numbers

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