Quotes about Destruction

The face of the angel of history is turned toward the past.  Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.  But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.  This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.  The storm is what we call progress.

We will find the key to our liberation only when we accept that what we once did to survive is now destroying us.

We kill with antibiotics and antiseptics, and if our slaughter is ineffectual we use surgery to expel the offending organ from our presence. We destroy the body in order to save it.

What will people say--in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.

"Man is always seeking a power, a power to overcome something or destroy something; and therefore he is not living in the awareness of God, because in the realization of the presence of God there is no need to overcome, to destroy, or to do anything."

When man was determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because.

Fiat money and sustainable society are not compatible.

The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to then create from them a new order.  We butcher, grind, chop, grate, mince, and liquefy raw ingredients, breaking down formerly living things so that we might recombine them in new, more cultivated forms.  When you think about it, this is the same rhythm, once removed, that governs all eating in nature, which invariably entails the destruction of certain living things, by chewing and then digestion, in order to sustain other living things.  In The Hungry Soul Leon Kass calls this the great paradox of eating:  “that to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form.”  If there is any shame in that destruction, only we humans seem to feel it, and then only on occasion.  But cooking doesn’t only distance us from our destructiveness, turning the pile of blood and guts into savory salami, it also symbolically redeems it, making good our karmic debts: Look what good, what beauty, can come of this!  Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter – this quantity of sacrificed life – just before the body takes its first destructive bite.

You can never destroy the ones you love, only the ones you hate. So the only way to avoid destruction is to love.

Those who don't build must burn.

He who destroys a life destroys the whole world; he who saves a life, saves the world entire.

The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.

"There are things that must be destroyed--or they'll destroy us."
--Ellsworth Toohey, The Fountainhead.

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.

For both excessive and insufficient exercise destroy one's strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases and preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the other virtues.
This much then, is clear: in all our conduct it is the mean that is to be commended.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist . . . concentration of power we are resisting the powers of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.

If you destroy a free market, you create a black market.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.

How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice. Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.

And when the stream Which overflowed the soul was passed away, A consciousness remained that it had left Deposited upon the silent shore Of memory images and precious thoughts That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise.

O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm, That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads. It has been woven over many centuries by the patience and sacrifice of countless liberty-loving men and women. It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of Jew and Gentile, of foreign and native born. Let us not tear it asunder. For no man knows, once it is destroyed, where or when man will find its protective warmth again.

If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.

Without order or authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty, during which men . . . forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice. . . . They forgot that their rights were founded on their duties. . . . They thought it clever to be cynical, enlightened to be unbelieving, and sensible to be soft.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

History is not going to be kind to liberals. With their mindless programs, they've managed to do to Black Americans what slavery, Reconstruction, and rank racism found impossible: destroy their family and work ethic.