Quotes & Sayings About Destruction Of Society

It is pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advanced' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction. — Noam Chomsky

Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar's immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar's immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly.

The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them. — Elisabet Sahtouris

And the PRCS [Palestinian Red Crescent Society] had not lost just one hospital: thirteen clinics and nine hospitals all over Lebanon had been destroyed in this way. Only Gaza Hospital, for a reason I was to discover three years later, was still standing. At the height of the air raids, when the Palestinians found out that every single PRCS hospital and clinic was a bomb target, they put three Israeli soldiers captured in south Lebanon on the upper floors of Gaza Hospital, and radioed a message to the Israeli Army saying that any further military action on Gaza Hospital would result in Israeli lives being lost. That saved Gaza Hospital from further destruction. — Ang Swee Chai

This bill will require the creation of a Federal police force of mammoth proportions. It also bids fair to result in the development of an 'informer' psychology in great areas of our national life-neighbors spying on neighbors, workers spying on workers, business spying on businessmen-were those who would harass their fellow citizens for selfish and narrow purposes will have ample inducement to do so. These, the Federal police force an 'informer' psychology, are the hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society. — Barry Goldwater

Without honoring Whores, we cannot truly understand and transcend the dynamics of violence, destruction and ignorance fostered in our cuntfearing society. — Inga Muscio

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

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

Ballet is merely a new rationalization of society's instinctive movement towards self-destruction. A dance of death for the Gadarene swine. — Eric Ambler

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. — George Orwell

He believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body. He advocated abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power. He believed in the gradual de-urbanization of modern metropolises by distributing the population more evenly in self-sufficient small towns and villages. Relying on the gentler technologies, he would build a new agricultural society. — Liu Cixin

You cannot seriously address the destruction of wilderness without addressing the society that is destroying it. — Judi Bari

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society - and especially in the economy - as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is creative destruction. — Peter F. Drucker

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization. — Jules Verne

This is our part in spiritual war. We proclaim Christ's truth by praying it, speaking it and (undoubtedly most importantly) by demonstrating it. We are not to accept with sere pious resignation the evil aspects of our world as "coming from a father's hand." Rather, following the example of our Lord and Savior, and going forth with the confidence that he has in principle already defeated his (and our) foes, we are to revolt against the evil aspects of our world as coming from the devil's hand. Our revolt is to be broad
as broad as the evil we seek to confront, and as broad as the work of the cross we seek to proclaim. Wherever there is destruction, hated, apathy, injustice, pain or hopelessness, whether it concerns God's creation, a structural feature of society, or the physical, psychological or spiritual aspect of an individual, we are in word and deed to proclaim to the evil powers that be, "You are defeated." As Jesus did, we proclaim this by demonstrating it. — Gregory A. Boyd

Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress. — T. E. Hulme

This is the gift of focus, or wilful denial, and it is something boys are particularly good at. Girls - at least where I grew up - tend to be more emotionally balanced and sane, and therefore find the kind of all-excluding concentration you need to care about dinosaurs, taxonomy, philately and geopolitical schemes a bit worrying and sad. Girls can grasp the bigger picture (i.e., it might be better not to destroy the world over this), where boys have a perfect grip on the fine print (i.e., this insidious idea is antithetical to our existence and cannot be allowed to flourish alongside our peace-loving, free society). Note carefully how it is probably better to let the girls deal with weapons of mass destruction. — Nick Harkaway

Where will it all end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone - that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master - the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course. — Bertrand De Jouvenel

These were rice paddies before they were parking lots. Rice was the basis for our society. Peasants planted the seeds and had highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. As the Master said, "Let the producers be many and the consumers few.' When the Feed came in from Atlantis, from Nippon, we no longer had to plant, because the rice now came from the matter compiler. It was the destruction of our society. When our society was based upon planting, it could truly be said, as the Master did, "Virtue is the root; wealth is the result.' But under the Western ti, wealth comes not from virtue but from cleverness. So the filial relationships became deranged. Chaos," Dr. X said regretfully, then looked up from his tea and nodded out the window. "Parking lots and chaos. — Neal Stephenson

War is the matter which fills all history; and consequently the only, or almost the only, view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape: and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another. — Edmund Burke

The instinct of self-preservation in human society, acting almost subconsciously, as do all drives in the human mind, is rebelling against the constantly refined methods of annihilation and against the destruction of humanity. — Bertha Von Suttner

It may be that a free society ... carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society ... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of something outside a species apparently intent on dooming itself. — Thomm Quackenbush

What is Science Fiction? It is the absence of governance and political arrangements in worlds where advanced technology marches onwards. Petty politics and primal instincts continue to dominate while scientific advancement continues. This is our problem today as well: our brightest minds devote themselves to science but shun governance and politics. So as in each catastrophe conjured and contemplated in science fiction, we run the risk of cosmic destruction, lest our greatest minds turn to resolving the outstanding problems of politics and governance first. — Usman W. Chohan

We cannot seem to help ourselves they said. Thus, the hominid spark of intelligence flares, burns everything around it, and fades. Some humans will survive the great conflagration. Thus, begins an endless cycle of destruction spiraling downward until our species is gone. We can hope that before the sun begins to become unstable (it is about half way there now) evolution can produce a new and better intelligence that will have sufficient breadth and depth to understand the ecological consequences of its actions. — Garry Rogers

By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors. — Laurent Dubois

There's a lot of talk in some of the other versions of the Bible, the Hebrew versions, and things about the end of the world not being a punishment from God, but being an invitation from mankind. That mankind has to invite its own destruction. And I think that's very true, and it's almost very American. I think that's the type of society we're in and it's people's very fear of the Antichrist that has created it — Marilyn Manson

That is the gay agenda ... it is the recreation of society on a different moral foundation and the problem with that is that moral foundation will lead to social chaos and destruction. — Scott Lively

The fallacy of the socialists37 lies in supposing that because in the present stage of European society property as a source of power is predominant, the same is true of India, or the same was true of Europe in the past. Religion, social status, and property are all sources of power and authority which one man has to control the liberty of another. One is predominant at one stage; the other is predominant at another stage. That is the only difference. If liberty is the ideal, and if liberty means the destruction of the dominion which one man holds over another, then obviously it cannot be insisted upon that economic reform must be the one kind of reform worthy of pursuit. If the source of power and dominion is, at any given time or in any given society, social and religious, then social reform and religious reform must be accepted as the necessary sort of reform. — B.R. Ambedkar

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. — James Baldwin

When people want to be rid of Heaven it is logical to start by creating an atmosphere in which spiritual things appear out of place; in order to be able to declare successfully that God is unreal they have to construct around man a false reality, a reality that is inevitably inhuman because only the inhuman can exclude God. What is involved is a falsification of the imagination and so its destruction. — Frithjof Schuon

Society establishment minus laws of God equals chaos and destruction — Sunday Adelaja

Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible. — Gus Hall

Have found that life persists in the midst of destruction. Therefore, there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would well-ordered society be intelligible and life worth living. If that is the law of life, we must work it out in daily existence. Wherever there are wars, wherever we are confronted with an opponent, conquer by love. I have found that the certain law of love has answered in my own life as the law of destruction has never done. — Paramahansa Yogananda

It is the absence of society that leads to destruction. When concord is lost, when arguments cease and in opposition neither side sees the other as kin, as brother and sister, then all manner of atrocity is possible. — Steven Erikson

I can to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation - those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, "He should have stayed in school," and then wash its hands of him — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of irrational motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable. They eschew self-criticism for amusement. They build fantastic non-reality-based belief systems that cater to human desires and illusions rather than human reality. These illusions, whether religious or secular, offer a simple and unexamined myth that the human race is advancing morally, spiritually and materially toward paradise. This advance is proclaimed as inevitable. This faith in our advancement makes us passive and complacent. — Chris Hedges

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy. — Alvin Toffler

And in garbage we find material proof that there is no plan for stewarding the earth, that resources are not being conserved, that waste and destruction are the necessary analogues of consumer society. This — Heather Rogers

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction. — Claude Levi-Strauss

A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity. — Charles Caleb Colton

Human beings have become a virus to planet Earth. Our way of life consists of constant pollution of natural resources, violence between nations, oppression of populations, torturing of animals, and the destruction of our own health and wellness. Our society is not sustainable and the people in control have no interest in the well being of the people or the planet. — Joseph P. Kauffman

It is interesting to note that the "sexual revolution" was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word "household" suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day. — Michel Houellebecq

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. — T. S. Eliot

The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. ... Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050. — Jacques Monod

A people who have suffered so much for so long at hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere ... the black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction. — Bobby Seale

I believe bending to the will or beliefs of one person and not being an individual will eventually lead to the perpetual destruction of society today as we know it! — Paul Lee

The trauma of 9/11 stimulated infinite possibilities for worry - some quite plausible, but most inspired by remote what-if fantasies. A society bingeing on fear makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction than terror attacks. The "terrorism war", like a nostalgic echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance a different agenda - the re-engineering of American life through permanent mobilization. — William Greider

In order to create it is necessary to destroy; and the agent of destruction in society is the poet. I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future. — Herbert Read

any society or government that relies too heavily on technology will find itself perched perilously on a crumbling precipice over the valley of death and destruction. — Michael Bunker

Destruction is as valid an artistic statement as construction. Both statements echo the model of the society we live in. The only invalid art is utopian — Dean Cavanagh

Do not be deceived by the outside appearance of order in our plutocratic society. It fares with it as it does with the older norms of war, that there is an outside look of quite wonderful order about it; how neat and comforting the steady march of the regiment; how quiet and respectable the sergeants look; how clean the polished cannon ... the looks of adjutant and sergeant as innocent-looking as may be, nay, the very orders for destruction and plunder are given with a quiet precision which seems the very token of a good conscience; this is the mask that lies before the ruined cornfield and the burning cottage, and mangled bodies, the untimely death of worthy men, the desolated home. — William Morris

No society can last in conditions of anarchy. This is self-evident and I am in full agreement. But my aim is not the establishment of an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. Here I differ from anarchists. I do not believe that it is possible to destroy the modern state. It is pure imagination to think that some day this power will be overthrown. From a pragmatic standpoint there is no chance of success. Furthermore, I do not believe that anarchist doctrine is the solution to the problem of organization in society and government. I do not think that if anarchism were to succeed we should have a better or more livable society. Hence I am not fighting for the triumph of this doctrine.
On the other hand, it seems to me that an anarchist attitude is the only one that is sufficiently radical in the face of a general statist system. — Jacques Ellul

Every single courageous act of coming out chips away at the curse of homophobia. Most importantly it's destroyed within yourself, and that act creates the potential for its destruction where it exists in friends, family and society. — Anthony Venn-Brown

Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: "We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world ... a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing ... we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man." This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world's leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent. — Algis Valiunas

[H]e initially conceived of Olivier as a man of the greatest promise destroyed by a fatal flaw, the unreasoning passion for a woman dissolving into violence, desperately weakening everything he tried to do. For how could learning and poetry be defended when it produced such dreadful results and was advanced by such imperfect creatures? At least Julien did not see the desperate fate of the ruined lover as a nineteenth-century novelist or a poet might have done, recasting the tale to create some appealing romantic hero, dashed to pieces against the unyielding society that produced him. Rather, his initial opinion
held almost to the last
was of Olivier as a failure, ruined by a terible weakness. — Iain Pears

Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself. — Barbara W. Tuchman

At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Time, my brothers and sisters, seems to be running out; we are not yet tearing one another apart, but we are tearing apart our common home. Today, the scientific community realizes what the poor have long told us: harm, perhaps irreversible harm, is being done to the ecosystem. The earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called "the dung of the devil". An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind. Once capital becomes an idol and guides people's decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home. — Pope Francis

For Burke, almost everything that makes life worthwhile is a result of society, its inherited codes, knowledge, and institutions. These goods are fragile, and when they are destroyed, the result is human misery ... Among the greatest of man's needs, according to Burke, was the need for society and government to provide "a sufficient restraint upon their passions." As far back as his Vindication of Natural Society, Burke had argued that the destruction of inherited institutions and cultural practices would result not in natural harmony, but in barbarism. For Burke, as for Adam Smith, man is preeminently social man who realizes himself morally only under the tutelage of society. (p. 131) — Jerry Z. Muller

The wars around the globe into which religion is woven
violence that over the past two decades has sent many tens of thousands of men, women, and children to terrible deaths in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the United States
deeply threaten what we have of a human society. Denouncing religion itself is futile. And such simple reactions badly miss the point. It is among the religious believers that the work must be done, within that overwhelming majority who would find common ground in being human and not wanting destruction, if only because their traditions are about so much more. Those traditions contain life-giving possibilities, even if the worst demagogues would try to twist dogma so hard as to wring poison from it. — Gustav Niebuhr

Love is basic for the birth of a true society, while violence has in it the essence of anti-sociality. Love is positive, is eternal: violence is degeneracy, it is it's own destruction. — Toyohiko Kagawa

It is more fun to listen to the radio speeches of a dictator than to study economic treatises. The entrepreneurs and technologists who pave the way for economic improvement work in seclusion; their work is not suitable to be visualized on the screen. But the dictators, intent upon spreading death and destruction, are spectacularly in sight of the public. Dressed in military garb they eclipse in the eyes of the movie-goers the colourless bourgeois in plain clothes. The problems of society's economic organization are not suitable for light talk at fashionable cocktail parties. Neither can they be dealt with adequately by demagogues haranguing mass assemblies. They are serious things. They require painstaking study. They must not be taken lightly. — Ludwig Von Mises

You think of me that way because you look at me and at what I do through the lens of your mundane understanding of the world. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, nation identity, any of a dozen more irrelevant markers, To mundanes they seem logical, for though mundanes connote see, understand, or acknowledge the demon worlds, still somewhere found buried in their ancient memories, they know that there are those that walk this earth and are other. That do not belong, that mean only harm and destruction. Since the demon threat is invisible to mundanes, they must assign the threat to others of their own kind. They place the face of their enemy onto the face of their neighbor, and thus are generations of misery assured. — Cassandra Clare

Wherever Europeans or the descendants of European emigrants live, we see Socialism at work to-day; and in Asia it is the banner round which the antagonists of European civilization gather. If the intellectual dominance of Socialism remains unshaken, then in a short time the whole co-operative system of culture which Europe has built up during thousands of years will be shattered. For a socialist order of society is unrealizable. All efforts to realize Socialism lead only to the destruction of society. Factories, mines, and railways will come to a standstill, towns will be deserted. The population of the industrial territories will die out or migrate elsewhere. The farmer will return to the self-sufficiency of the closed, domestic economy. Without private ownership in the means of production there is, in the long run, no production other than a hand-to-mouth production for one's own needs. — Ludwig Von Mises

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. — Chris Hedges

All forms of destructions all around us. Destruction in values, destruction in people, destruction in faith, destruction in elders, destruction in the pulpit, destruction in the youth, destruction in government, destruction in society etc. — Sunday Adelaja

...only the one who knows and practices the iconoclastic fury of destruction can possess the joy born of freedom, of that unique freedom fertilized by sorrow. I rise up against the reality of the outer world for the triumph of the reality of my inner world. I reject society for the triumph of the I. I reject the stability of every rule, every custom, every morality, for the affirmation of every willful instinct, all free emotionality, every passion and every fantasy. I mock at every duty and every right so I can sing free will. I scorn the future to suffer and enjoy my good and my bad in the present. I despise humanity because it is not my humanity. I hate tyrants and I detest slaves. I don't want and I don't grant solidarity, because I am convinced that it is a new chain, and because I believe with Ibsen that the one who is most alone is the strongest one. This is my Nihilism. — Renzo Novatore

I was created, then the Society ordered the destruction of all mods. The day after I was born, the date of my death was set! So I sweated in that pill, just waiting to die. Day after day, my brothers and sisters were killed. Then I got lucky and got shipped out with a load of goods by mistake. Still, I always expected to be discovered and destroyed. I had a lot of time to think about things. I decided no one has the right to take a life. I exist! I should have the right to live and die freely!! Like humans, or even bugs. Even a mod should have that right. So I refuse to take a life. I won't kill ... not anything! — Tite Kubo

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

Marx was wrong: It is not only the 'means of production' that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or just war readiness, are daunting ... The resulting cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best terms a 'depleted' state, in which the military has drained reources from all other social functions. — Barbara Ehrenreich

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young," [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture - the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of 'the wild' from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. 'Deranging the senses' was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.

"Today," he continued, "the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity. — Peter Coyote

The unwholesome-looking little moral agent of destruction exulted silently in the possession of personal prestige, keeping in check this man armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society. More fortunate than Caligula, who wished that the Roman Senate had only one head for the better satisfaction of his cruel lust, he beheld in that one man all the forces he had set at defiance: the force of law, property, oppression, and injustice. He beheld all his enemies and fearlessly confronted them all in a supreme satisfaction of his vanity. They stood perplexed before him as if before a dreadful portent. He gloated inwardly over the chance of this meeting affirming his superiority over all the multitude of mankind. — Joseph Conrad

They [feminists] share the instinct for tyranny and destruction - and they are filled with self-loathing. In the end, leftist feminists yearn to submit to, and submerge themselves within, a despotic monolith. Because they despise their own society and are bent on its destruction, they cannot concede that adversarial cultures may be more evil, because that would legitimize their own host society - and they can't allow that. It would rob them of the moral indignation -- and the identity of being victims -- that lies at the foundation of their politics of hate. — Jamie Glazov

In fact, all the additional knowledge gained by an irrationally constituted society may but enlarge and enhance the powers of death and destruction. — Paul A. Baran

Some voluntary castaways there will always be, whom no fostering kindness and no parental care can preserve from self-destruction; but if any are lost for want of care and culture, there is a sin of omission in the society to which they belong. — Robert Southey

How could a society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened, and what can be done with a people master of itself if it not subject to God? — Alexis De Tocqueville

Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to "respect" it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings. — Richard Dawkins

The essence of justice is mercy. Making a child suffer for wrong-doing is merciful to the child. There is no mercy in letting the child have its own will, plunging headlong to destruction with the bits in its mouth. There is no mercy to society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed and the right vindicated. We injure the culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the bar of justice, if we do not make him feel that he has done a wrong thing. We may deliver his body from the prison, but not at the expense of justice nor to his own injury. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Uncertainty is everywhere. But I am living in the midst of the uncertainty and risk, amid things that can and do bring physical destruction, because I am running from things that can destroy my soul, complacency, comfort and ignorance. I am much more terrified of living a comfortable life in a self serving society and failing to follow Jesus than I am of any illness or tragedy. — Katie J. Davis

We live in the dark ages. If an intelligent society can destroy itself in large numbers and places the largest amount of revenues in instruments of destruction, it is certainly not an evolved society or an intelligent society. — Frederick Lenz

When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right. — Phil Ochs

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay ... , from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men ... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77) — Sigmund Freud

If, in the final stage of disintegration, antisemitic slogans proved the most effective means of inspiring and organizing great masses of people for imperialist expansion and destruction of the old forms of government, then the previous history of the relationship between Jews and the state must contain elementary clues to the growing hostility between certain groups of society and the Jews. We — Hannah Arendt

He sees such a desperate rapaciousness prevail; such a disregard to equity, such contempt of order, such stupid blindness to future consequences, as must immediately have the most tragical conclusion, and most terminate in destruction to the greater number, and in a total dissolution of society to the rest. — David Hume

Today the influences of your society pressure you to be successful before your time. They are pulling you down. They have pulled you down, you big, sweet, magnificent, young, potential artists. They have pulled you down so far that you are on the verge of destruction. Only you don't know it because you want to be a success — Stella Adler

It is a fact that unless children are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, they, and the society which they constitute or control, will go to destruction. Consequently, when a state resolves that religious instruction shall be banished from the schools and other literary institutions, it virtually resolves on self-destruction. — Charles Hodge

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds", says Mrs. Phillips. "Our members will not be allowed to wear, or buy, ant hats with feathers, and they must devote themselves to the cause of protecting the birds and discouraging their wanton destruction. — Helen Humphreys

Whenever, in any era, culture, or society, you encounter the phenomenon of prejudice, injustice, persecution, and blind, unreasoning hatred directed at some minority group - look for the gang that has something to gain from that persecution, look for those who have a vested interest in the destruction of these particular sacrificial victims. Invariably, you will find that the persecuted minority serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its own goals to be known. — Ayn Rand

The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war. — Lester B. Pearson

Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology ... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there. — William Commanda

The immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal "death trip," of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis - for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about. — James Howard Kunstler

The US was forced to withdraw troops from Iraq after an extremely costly decade-long military occupation, leaving in place a regime more closely allied to Iran, the US' regional adversary. The Iraq war depleted the economy, deprived American corporations of oil wealth, greatly enlarged Washington's budget and trade deficits, and reduced the living standards of US citizens. The Afghanistan war had a similar outcome, with high external costs, military retreat, fragile clients, domestic disaffection, and no short or medium term transfers of wealth (imperial pillage) to the US Treasury or private corporations. The Libyan war led to the total destruction of a modern, oil-rich economy in North Africa, the total dissolution of state and civil society, and the emergence of armed tribal, fundamentalist militias opposed to US and EU client regimes in North and sub-Sahara Africa and beyond. Instead — James F. Petras

Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of "negative growth". — Eckhart Tolle

An all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In — George Orwell

Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is, Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably. — Leo Tolstoy

The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one's own destruction, has become a "biological" need. — Herbert Marcuse

Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left? We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance. The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life. — Jacob Needleman

Just as a human soul that faces great difficulties also faces great opportunities for spiritual growth, so a human society that faces destruction also faces the opportunity to enter a period of renaissance. I think that, barring an accident, the wish to survive will keep us from a nuclear war. — Peace Pilgrim

In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy? — Mahatma Gandhi