Self Destruction Quotes - Page 4

• Procrastination is the seed of self destruction.

  Matthew Burton

  Procrastination, Self, Destruction

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I claim that every woman in this century and in our culture sphere who has ventured into male-dominated institutions - 'literature' and 'aesthetics' are such institutions - must have experienced the desire for self-destruction.

  Christa Wolf

  Self, Desire, Males

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• The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

  Gore Vidal

  Army, Self, World

  "The End of Gore Vidal". Interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh, www.guernicamag.com. August 15, 2012.

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• You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Two, Self, Law

  Source: rzim.org

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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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• Heroism--that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Self, Goal

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

  John Cusack

  Thinking, Self, Darkness

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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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• Humanity was drawn to turmoil and self-destruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun.

  Dean Koontz

  Self, Humanity, Earth

  Dean Koontz (2007). “Dark Rivers of the Heart: A Novel”, p.38, Bantam

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• I want to be the apostle of self destruction. I want my book to affect man's reason, his emotions, his nerves, his whole animal nature. I should like my book to make people turn pale with horror as they read it, to affect them like a drug, like a terrifying dream, to drive them mad, to make them curse and hate me but still to read me.

  Leonid Andreyev

  Dream, Hate, Book

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• For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.

  J. G. Ballard

  Children, Moving, Technology

  "JG Ballard: Theatre of Cruelty". Interview with Jean-Paul Coillard, 1998.

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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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• 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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• When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Self, Doe

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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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