Corrosive Quotes & Sayings

I personally believe that the iPod is a frankly corrosive device because it encourages you to surround yourself with your favorites. The whole idea of a playlist is to surround yourself with your favorite things, and the interesting thing is that when you do that, they cease to be your favorites. — Hugh Laurie

In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist. — Caitlin Flanagan

I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois's learning and Baldwin's love and Langston's humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art's redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels. — Barack Obama

To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position. — Denise Mina

It was a night replaying its corrosive recurrence on the road of our lives, on the road which was hungry for great transformations. — Ben Okri

We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did. — David Boies

Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it. — Gary Hamel

Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. — Tony Judt

The drive for perfectionism is a corrosive waste of time, because nothing is ever beyond criticism. No — Elizabeth Gilbert

Care is no cure, but rather corrosive, For things that are not to be remedied. — William Shakespeare

I could no longer picture Rosalind in my mind's eye; the tender vision of the girl in white had been blown to pieces as if by a nuclear bomb. This was something unimaginable, something hollow as the yellowed husks that insects leave behind in dry grass, blowing with cold alien winds and a fine corrosive dust that shredded everything it touched. — Tana French

The only antidote for the corrosive poison of violence is finding peace within yourself. — Christopher Paolini

Reality is what I make it. That is what I have said I believed. Then I look at the hell I am wallowing in, nerves paralyzed, action nullified - fear, envy, hate: all the corrosive emotions of insecurity biting away at my sensitive guts. Time, experience: the colossal wave, sweeping tidal over me, drowning, drowning. How can I ever find that permanence, that continuity with past and future, that communication with other human beings that I crave? Can I ever honestly accept an artificial imposed solution? How can I justify, how can I rationalize the rest of my life away? — Sylvia Plath

I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent. — Steve Jobs

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug. — Caroline Knapp

The defining characteristic of today's intellectual and media elite is that it swims merrily in a sea of fantasy. The world of television is essentially a fantasy world, and television is today's [1980's] common denominator of communication, today's unifying American experience. This has frightening implications for the future. Ideas that fit on bumper stickers are not ideas at all, they simply are attitudes. And attitudinizing is no substitute for analysis. Unfortunately, too often television is to news as bumper stickers are to philosophy, and this has a corrosive effect on public understanding of those issues on which national survival may depend. — Richard M. Nixon

If you are ever tempted to experiment with the alluring offerings of Lucifer first calmly analyze the inevitable consequences of such choices and your life will not be shattered. You cannot ever sample those things that are forbidden of God as destructive of happiness and corrosive to spiritual guidance without tragic results. — Richard G. Scott

We place such crazy importance on physical appearance in our image-obsessed culture, on youth and beauty to define our sense of self-worth, that aging, by default, becomes a kind of defect, something secret and corrosive and shameful. — Ruth Ozeki

Envy and resentment are terribly corrosive passions. To suffer at the sight or even the thought of others' enjoyment of life makes one a committed enemy of human happiness. Such people end up being practically a curse upon the human race. They vandalize life, exerting themselves not in the pursuit of gain or pleasure, but to hinder others' enjoyment. — Robert Sheaffer

In the words of then - vice president Richard Nixon, the increasing crime rate "can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them."37 — Michelle Alexander

There is nothing more corrosive to character than money. — Helen Simonson

I have a friend - or had a friend, now dead - Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it ... and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too. — Steven Weinberg

It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined. — William J. Brennan

Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence. — Ellen Willis

Hungarian Language - savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura ... words of nectar and cyanide. — Emile M. Cioran

Where something even deeper than the marrow knows that the cost of avoiding what one fears is even greater than the actual object of that fear and so the fear itself is even more corrosive even more destructive than all the frightening potential of the thing that arouses it. — Joe Henry

The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and 'family values' are crushed by grinding poverty, which also makes violent crime and drugs attractive alternatives to desperate young men and sends young women into prostitution. Family values are no less corrupted by the corrosive effects of individualism, consumerism, and the accumulation of wealth. Instead of shouting this from the mountain tops, the get-me-to-heaven-and-the-rest-be-damned Christianity the Christian Right preaches is itself a version of selfish spiritual capitalism aimed at netting major and eternal dividends, and it fits hand in glove with American materialism and greed. — John D. Caputo

My assessment is that we have a crisis in national political leadership. When will America recognize the danger we face? When will the corrosive partisanship of American politics end and allow for a bipartisan solution to arguably the most dangerous threat our nation has faced in over 60 years? — Ricardo Sanchez

Fame is very corrosive and you have to guard very strictly against it. — Edward Norton

In some circumstances, a focus on extrinsic rewards (money) can actually diminish effort. Most (or at least many) teachers enter their profession not because of the money but because of their love for children and their dedication to teaching. The best teachers could have earned far higher incomes if they had gone to banking. It is almost insulting to assume that they are not doing what they can to help their students learn, and that by paying them an extra $500 or $1,500, they would exert greater effort. Indeed, incentive pay can be corrosive: it reminds teachers of how bad their pay is, and those who are led thereby to focus on money may be induced to find a better paying job, leaving behind only those for whom teaching is the only alternative. (Of course, if teachers perceive themselves to be badly paid, that will undermine morale, and that will have adverse incentive effects) — Joseph E. Stiglitz

Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry. — Carl Sagan

Thus to forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, that greatest good, communal harmony that enhances the humanity and personhood of all in the community. — Desmond Tutu

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive. — Robert Charles Wilson

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought. — Eugenio Montale

Forgiveness is truly the grace by which we enable another person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew. To not forgive leads to bitterness and hatred. Like self-hatred and self-contempt, hatred of others gnaws away at our vitals. Whether hatred is projected out or stuffed in, it is always corrosive to the human spirit. — Desmond Tutu

Of all the deprivations which afflict humankind, none is more dreadful than loneliness. A corrosive, it eats the heart out. People were meant to live by twos, with someone close with whom to share good and bad, to hear breathing in the dark room at night. Being alone is the one unnatural act. — Zelda Popkin

Note to clients, quicklime is a preservative, not a corrosive. — Kelley Armstrong

Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole-corrosive, like seawater, scented with the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief. — Simon Mawer

The oppression of women is the single most corrosive and urgent problem of our time. — Brandi Carlile

The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians - and Christian conservatives most significantly - unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzscheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist. — James Davison Hunter

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless. — Sam Harris

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as "identities" that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation. — Susan Sontag

Social welfare is the most corrosive behavioral force ever unleashed by man. — James Cook

To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest good. — Desmond Tutu

Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good. — David Brooks

As I see the world, there's one element that's even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It's not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection. — Tahir Shah

We get angry when others hurt us, both by what they say and what they do. We get angry when we don't get our own way or our plans and dreams are frustrated. Anger may arise in an instant, erupting like a volcano and raining destruction on everyone in sight. Often, anger simmers just below the surface, sometimes for a lifetime. Like a corrosive acid, this kind of anger eats away at our bodies and souls, yet we may not even be aware of its presence. — Billy Graham

For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty. — John D. MacDonald

We must understand the need for perfectionism is a corrosive waste of time, because nothing is ever beyond criticism. No matter how many hours you spend to render something flawless, somebody will always be able to find fault with it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean - mending old things, preserving them, looking after them - on some level there's no rational grounds for it - ... fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn't be an object. It'd be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.
- Hobie, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt — Donna Tartt

Breath; but the dead air seemed to shrivel his lungs, and he dropped his head and dozed till the house was reached. Every effort of will was torture, yet he was called upon continually to make efforts of will. He gave the black he had ridden a nip of trade-gin. Viaburi, the house-boy, brought him corrosive sublimate and water, and he took a thorough antiseptic wash. He dosed himself with chlorodyne, took his own pulse, smoked a thermometer, and lay back on the couch with a suppressed groan. It was mid-afternoon, and he had completed his third round that day. He called the house-boy. "Take um big fella look along Jessie," he commanded. The boy carried the long telescope out on — Jack London

Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency. — Mao Zedong

But the horror that's destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It's a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul's body. It's the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? — Fernando Pessoa

It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others' self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are. — David Foster Wallace

The clearest thing about a dangerous road is that you evidently understand how childish, how dull, how stagnant and how corrosive the easy road is! To gleam glamorously, chose the dangerous roads! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I needed cutting now the way a diabetic needs insulin. It was a bulwark, steady and unyielding, I could throw up against the insidious, corrosive lapping of a whispering sea of uneasiness. — Caroline Kettlewell

Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp. — Richard Dawkins

Built to be lonely
to love the absent.
Find me
Free me
from this
corrosive doubt
futile despair
horror in repose.
I can fill my space
fill my time
but nothing can fill this void in my heart. — Sarah Kane

In an age when young people are encouraged to maximize self-interest and self-advancement, the grounds for altruism or even good behavior become obscured. Short of reverting to religious authority - itself on occasion corrosive of secular institutions - what can furnish a younger generation with a sense of purpose beyond its own short-term advantage? — Tony Judt

One of the most corrosive aspects of the criminal justice system is its toleration of the insanity defense...Legitimate in some few cases, the insanity defense has been rendered farcical through its manipulation by so-called experts. — Robert K. Tanenbaum

Like his admirer Samuel Beckett, Johnson locates his voices among conditions of such deprivation that even the most miserable memories are gilded by comparison: this paradox fuels equal parts of comedy and pathos. Never sentimental, at once corrosive and elegiac, House Mother Normal is a remarkable achievement. — James Marcus

The liquid state of modernity is corrosive to continuity. — Samuel Wilson

Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good. To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. What dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me. It gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them. When uhuru, or freedom and independence, — Desmond Tutu

You want your art to be hip and seem cool to people, but a great deal of what passes for hip or cool is now highly commercially driven. And some if it is important art. I think 'The Simpsons' is important art. On the other hand, it's also, in my opinion, relentlessly corrosive to the soul and everything is parodied and everything is ridiculous. Maybe I'm old but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it and then I have to walk away and look at a flower.
If there's something to be talked about, that thing is this weird conflict between what my girlfriend calls the 'inner sap,' the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff and the part of us that has to live in a world of smart, jaded, sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by those people. — David Foster Wallace

... instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it... the most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again. — Jeremy Paxman

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came. — Peter Matthiessen

None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded. Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom. The liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and the threat of power. — Seth Dickinson

Corporate tax dodging impacts us across generations and over time. It is corrosive. It is unethical. It is unsustainable. — James P. Hoffa

And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history ... — James Joyce

Philosophy can be compared to some powders that are so corrosive that, after they have eaten away the infected flesh of a wound, they then devour the living flesh, rot the bones, and penetrate to the very marrow. Philosophy at first refutes errors. But if it is not stopped at this point, it goes on to attack truths. And when it is left on its own, it goes so far that it no longer knows where it is and can find no stopping place. — Pierre Bayle

Money is becoming one of the most corrosive elements of politics. — Trent Lott

Hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy. — Liu Xiaobo

Evil is always devising more corrosive misery through man's restless need to exact revenge out of his hate. — Ralph Steadman

That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men. — Christina Hoff Sommers

If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past and the corrosive effects of perpetual physical discomfort on the nerves, then we have mercifully forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours
ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, sudden stench of old death from butchers' shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.
You would drench your handkerchief with cologne and press it to your nose. You would splash yourself with parma violet so that the reek of fleshly decay you always carried with you was overlaid by that of the embalming parlour. You would abhor the air you breathed. — Angela Carter

I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences. — Michael Crichton

The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had. — Ian McEwan

Death, he had come to believe, was a corrosive thing, and the more he was around it , the more it gnawed away at who he was. — Christopher Paolini

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good. — Philip Pullman

Don't drink fluoridated water ... Fluoride is a corrosive poison which will produce harm on a long term basis. — Charles Bernhard Heyd

Resentment is a powerful and corrosive force, both on the slippery left and the slippery right, and the history of humankind can largely be read as a history of resentment. Aside from a profound philosophy of capital, what we really need is a profound psychology and philosophy of resentment. We must learn to live for ourselves, without reference to the other, and, at the same time, to rise above and beyond ourselves. Or else history will keep repeating itself, and our life will be a living death. — Neel Burton

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean. — John Banville

Lies were like acid, corrosive: They could dissolve trust in a heartbeat. — Rob Thurman

Bitterness can be corrosive. It can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes. — Fredrik Backman

There are lots of special places and special jobs, but for me being a Las Vegas dice dealer was pretty sublime. It was somehow timeless. Timeless and imbued with the corrosive and bland patina of a mundane evil, a venality, a soulless mockery of human aspirations. What could be more useless than playing with money? — Jesse Kaellis

He could taste the familiar tang of museum air - an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon - the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors. — Dan Brown

Did you even realize who was at that table?" The one with long, dark, wavy hair laughs. "I mean, let's just for a minute acknowledge that you just sang to two of the members from Corrosive Velocity and Jackson Shaw! Like, from The Forgotten, Jackson Shaw."
"Sid, keep it down." The other hisses so low, I'm almost unable to hear her.
Realizing this is my snake charmer, I slip into autopilot with the gathering fans: nod, smile, and sign.
"You've got to be more excited. I mean, the man is seven feet of lickable body graffiti. Whew! I'd climb his beanstalk any day. — Sadie Grubor

A combination of fine tea, enchanting objects and soothing surroundings exerts a therapeutic effect by washing away the corrosive strains and stress of modern life. [ ... It] induces a modd that is spiritually refreshing [and produces] a genial state of mind. — John Blofeld

"I am appalled at the prospect of using water as a vehicle for drugs. Fluoride is a corrosive poison that will produce serious effect on a long-range basis. Any attempt to use the water this way is deplorable." Charles Gordon Heyd, M.D., Past President, American Medical Association. — Charles Bernhard Heyd

If life and youth were not immune to the corrosive effects of time, why should love be any different? — Jill Archer

Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds. — Ricardo Piglia

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic. — E. O. Wilson

Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born negro, has written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel entitled "Native Son". — David L. Cohn

Our political debates today are corrosive and not reflective of the belief that Abe Lincoln espoused back in his day: that we are a great country because we are a good country. — Jon Huntsman Jr.

Even when our intentions are noble and our efforts sincere, even when we dedicate our lives to the service of others, the corrosive pressure of frantic over-activity can nonetheless cause suffering in ourselves and others. A "successful" life can become a violent enterprise. — Wayne Muller

Money is the most corrosive aspect of life today because it means that all attention to detail is forgotten. — Roberto Cavalli

The challenge is to explain, without resorting to the all-too-easy concept of evil, how people are capable of causing extreme hurt to one another. So let's substitute the term "evil" with the term "empathy erosion." Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect. In theory these are transient emotions, the empathy erosion reversible. But empathy erosion can be the result of more permanent psychological characteristics. — Simon Baron-Cohen

There's nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion. — Paula Hawkins

Which is more subversive-and corrosive-to believe in altruism or to see it simply as a cloak of self interest? Even if altruism did not exist, it would be necessary to believe in it. Pessimists in power are prone to despotism. — Frank Prochaska