Great Undermining Quotes & Sayings

Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain. — Steve Erickson

I think all great comedies - or at least the comedies I like - it has some of the funniest moments, but it never breaks the spell for the audience. It never pushes the audience away by spoofing itself too much or undermining the characters or making them cardboard or flimsy. Everybody is really trying to do what their characters believe in - and so nobody breaks the spell of the world, even though in other ways it's a comedy and very funny. — James Franco

The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries - a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man. — Gerald Durrell

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes connot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality ... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. — C.S. Lewis