Selected destruction quotes

1. How can we still speak of the salvation and reformation of Europe, when we have to ask Europe's destroyer for help?

2. Personally, I am dead against the burning of books.

3. As soon as the war ended, we located the one spot on earth that hadn't been touched by the war and blew it to hell.

4. White as a winding sheet, Masks blowing down the street: Moscow, Paris London, Vienna - all are undone. The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, The world's floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking.

5. By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

6. If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.

7. Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

8. Law is a Bottomless-Pit, it is a Cormorant, a Harpy, that devours every thing.

9. A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.

10. The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground.

11. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

12. Once more a red fire blows steeply upwards...the factory will do no more work for Herr Churchill...tomorrow morning Coventry will lie in smoke and ruins.

13. Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.

14. The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

15. What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

16. Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

17. And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

18. The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).

19. Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

20. We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.

21. Every seemingly arbitrary destructive action is a reaction of the organism to the frustration of a gratification of a vital need, especially of a sexual need.

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

23. The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions - to destroy.

24. Destruction can be beautiful!

25. When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead - When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed.

26. Broken glass. It's just like glitter, isn't it?

27. 'Each man kills the things he loves'. I recognise that in myself, in relationships, even with guitars, beautiful things that I've had and wilfully destroyed.

28. We read our mail and counted up our missions - In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school - Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, 'Our casualties were low.' They said, 'Here are the maps'; we burned the cities.

29. To contrive a little kingdom, in the midst of the universal muck, then shit on it, ah that was me all over.

30. 'Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction. '

31. 'To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.'

32. 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.

33. The good die first, And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust Burn to the socket.

34. Of course, Alexander the Great was a hero, but why smash the chairs?

35. The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities.

36. Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.

37. For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something he could set on fire. Unfortunately he again and again finds hirelings who open the gates of their country to this international incendiary.

38. Final Ruin fiercely drives Her plowshare o'er creation.

39. That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature.

40. Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

41. Years of misguided teaching have resulted in the destruction of the best in our society, in our cultures and in the environment.

42. Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

43. That eagle's fate and mine are one, Which on the shaft that made him die Espied a feather of his own, Wherewith he wont to soar so high.

44. To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.

45. Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.

46. Oaks shall be rent; the Word shall shatter - Yea, on that fiery day, the Crown, Even the palace walls shall totter, And domes and spires come crashing down.

47. Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death!

48. Mankind is composed of two sorts of men - those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.

49. Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!

50. Enillwn y Fro Gymraeg, ac fe enillir Cymru, ac oni enillir y Fro Gymraeg, nid Cymru a enillir.'

51. I saw Substance D growing. I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color.

52. Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

53. This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead That sparkled so the day I saw it first, And darkened slowly after. I am she Who loves all beauty - yet I wither it.

54. Brennt Paris?!

55. Nicht durch Zorn, sondern durch Lachen todtet ma