Top 151 Destructive Quotes

A computer can be a useful and indispensable tool. But if we allow it to devour our time with vain, unproductive, and sometimes destructive pursuits, it becomes an entangling net.

Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame‘s is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.

Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.

I am convinced that policies meant to reduce alleged carbon dioxide-induced global warming will be destructive.

We live in the greatest country in the world, but the tone and destructive rhetoric across the ideological spectrum is tearing our country apart and we must return to a society that works towards finding common ground on issues where we disagree.

But that citizen‘s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Often, especially young artists, you feel like you should be doing something. And I think that can be very destructive because creativity is about connecting with the stuff that’s deep inside you and making something out of that.

There is something familial about punk. There is something positive. Even though some punk is destructive, nihilistic, explosive.

Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation.

Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place.

I actually found it very moving how destructive depression is. I was really saddened by this burden people have to handle.

I’m still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that’s the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

Over the years, I have seen the power of the oceans to excite, feed, and sustain people. I have also seen them undergo a growing onslaught of attacks, from destructive fishing practices to rising acidification.

Aggression is inherently destructive of relationships. People and ideologies are pitted against each other, believing that in order to survive, they must destroy the opposition.

When I’m governor, we’re not going to be silent like Bruce Rauner. Illinois will be a firewall against Donald Trump‘s destructive and bigoted agenda.

Ignoring negative things that need to be changed is destructive and does nothing to alleviate negativity. Instead, we should focus on the way we’re treating other people in our brief interactions with them.

In middle school, we are all so damn insecure. It was the worst time for me, really destructive, like slapping myself across the face but loving it. Now I have to be an adult and change myself. I have to be a bigger person.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

The idea that you can get everything you want in one person is destructive, and maybe when you accept that the number is closer to 50 or 60 or 70 percent, that’s when you can start to make some progress in choosing the right person.

The remarkable thing about the Chinese is that they’ve operated differently than the Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans. By and large, they have not done destructive hacks.

I’ve always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I’ve seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they’ve stayed with me and comforted me.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

The media has bought into the whole social revolution, the Kinsey ideas, and has been completely taken over by the feminists. And the feminists, I think, are the most destructive elements in our society.

New technologies can be used for destructive purposes. The answer is to develop rapid-response systems for new dangers like a bioterrorist creating a new biological virus.

There were days that I literally had no reason to get out of bed. It just was so destructive for me.

In the back of my mind for many years, I had always felt that my relationship with alcohol, although seemingly harmless was unhealthy and somewhat destructive.

The Internet provides very serious challenges to our ability to keep from children the kinds of things that are destructive to them.

I feel like I’ve had bad nights or destructive nights or nights where I don’t remember anything or nights where I was seriously injured or seriously in danger. And I remained nihilistic and unconcerned because it felt like there was no alternative.

You see, nature will do exactly what it must, and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a way, we will go.

The sheer drop in sterling since 2016 is only a taste of what’s to come if we continue down the destructive route of a no-deal Brexit.

Really, the ocean itself – that’s really the thing that we’re up against, the most destructive environment on the planet.

A majority of Americans want redemption for racism – for our terrible, destructive racist past – and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive.

Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

The Internet has become a hate-filled town square with no limits put on destructive verbal behavior.

Now, I’m not onboard with the argument that jokes are destructive to humanity. There are bigger issues, and I do not necessarily subscribe to the belief that jokes perpetuate violence and racism. They lampoon those things most of the time. But I could be wrong about that. I’m not a sociologist or an expert.

As God took me through the journey that became the Bible study ‘Breaking Free‘, He taught me to look for a common denominator among the things that triggered my destructive habits.

The global jihad movement ideology is a destructive religious cult. It is so un-Islamic that it is virtually anti-Islamic.

We must act to reduce the increasingly dangerous and destructive levels of carbon pollution that account for practically all of global climate change.

Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.

Almost half our representatives in Washington apparently know more about science than our scientists. Or they pretend to, because big corporations give them a lot of money to make sure they can keep doing the destructive things that they do.

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they’ve been politically repressive.

In 2018, my biggest worry is actually about North Korea. I worry a great deal that they may do a destructive attack, perhaps against our financial sector, in an attempt to deter a potential U.S. strike against either their nuclear facilities or even the regime itself.

Mental agitations and eating cares are more injurious to health, and destructive of life, than is commonly imagined, and could their effects be collected, would make no inconsiderable figure in the bills of mortality.

Innocence is a pretty dangerous thing, you know. Revisit Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot‘ or, for that matter, Greene’s ‘The Quiet American’ to find out how destructive it can be.

Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point.

Cyber weapons won‘t go away, and their spread can’t be controlled. Instead, as we’ve done for other destructive technologies, the world needs to establish a set of principles to determine the proper conduct of governments regarding cyber conflict.

The more settled I’ve become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.

Mania is the most destructive of the forces. Everybody around you will tell you you’re in trouble, and you can’t hear what they are saying.

There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

Outside the walls, among others, is the Soviet Empire. It is malevolent, destructive and expanding. It has swallowed up over half a dozen countries since World War II.

I was always performing, doing silly voices. The teachers realized I could go one of two ways: be creative or destructive.

No one would deny that feeling envy is unpleasant, or that feeling envious sometimes leads us down a path we wish we hadn’t taken. Envy is frequently corrosive and destructive.

Limiting the destructive risk-taking by large financial firms and banks which are ‘too big to fail’ is needed.

The book is a dialogue between The Dalai Lama and a group of scientists about how we can better handle our destructive emotions and how to overcome them.

Self-deprecation runs right through queer culture. It was seen as a badge of honor. I started to feel like perhaps it was destructive as well.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

We cannot sell out our public lands for destructive fossil fuel development that pollutes our air, water, and land.

I don’t understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one’s income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive.

If it is, in reality, capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms of resistance to the West.

Divorce is one of the most destructive, emotionally traumatic experiences a human being can go through, no matter if you’re the instigator or the recipient. It’s hard, and it hurts, and it takes a long time to feel normal again.

What is new is the multiplying reach and volume of the Internet, concentrating the toxicity of destructive emotions and circulating them in the political bloodstream with unparalleled velocity.

History has shown that a government‘s redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector‘s creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.

Sometimes I think that we are living in a simulation controlled by the reigns of a destructive child who often gets bored or distracted, leaving us trapped inside feedback loops for years at a time.

Wars, however frequent and destructive they may be, have never been able to kill entirely the intellectual and moral sense which raises man above the beast.

I have lately returned from Harpers Ferry, to which place I was suddenly called, on the 17th instant, by causes the most disturbing and destructive to the peace and safety of this State.

Oh yes, there’s lots of great food in America. But the fast food is about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth, convenience, and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.

Giving teenagers some inspiration, a single role model and an opportunity to be part of something bigger at a critical point in their lives can be the difference between being a productive or being a destructive member of society.

The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive – that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They’re so easy to consume and so endlessly available.

For eons, humans have struggled to find less destructive ways of living together.

Looking back on it, now I can identify the points in my life when I wasn’t playing, and music – and didn’t have that outlet – those were the points when I was most unguided and self destructive because I didn’t have that channel to get those energies out. I’m a much healthier person when I play music.

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive.

The insatiable need for heartless power and ruthless control is the telltale sign of an uninitiated man – the most irresponsible, incompetent and destructive force on earth.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

People like to let loose at rock concerts and it gives them an excuse to do it in a way that is not destructive to others and not really destructive to the band.

Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.

One of the most destructive things that’s happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together – which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.

Modern terrorism is too destructive to be tolerated, much less supported.

I’ve become less tolerant as I’ve got older, but I put that down to realising there are people out there who actually enjoy being destructive, and that those people will never change.

We’re all part of humanity. And maybe there’s something about the worst people, with the most destructive, warped minds, that is just an acceleration of something that is in quite a few of us.

It’s been one of the most painful things I’ve ever been through in my whole life: trying to understand the degree to which behaviors that I thought were totally appropriate were destructive.

When we lose hope that there is a possibility of reaching the other side – I don’t even like to say the ‘other side’ because there are so many sides, and breaking it down into us/them is oversimplifying – it allows us to treat people in a way that’s incredibly destructive.

Unlike President Obama, Mitt Romney has been inside the bubble all his life. He has no idea what’s going on here. He has no idea how destructive Bush‘s eight years were to this country.

Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.

The attitude of ‘every nation unto itself’ is a destructive one for the future of Israel.

I don’t find any kind of tension very productive, I find it destructive, actually.

The coal mining industry is very destructive and it doesn’t have to be.

Ideology that believes government is bad, and that public institutions and places are not valuable, is as destructive as corporate greed.

Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon.’

The denial of female aggression is a destructive myth. It robs an entire gender of a significant spectrum of power, leaving women less than equal with men and effectively keeping them ‘in their place’ and under control.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

And I communed with many different faiths and even when I wanted to be rebellious I never did not believe in Him. I never believed the people who said God was destructive or punishing.

While the national highway system connects cities and facilitates economic activity across the nation, it’s construction historically has been deeply destructive for many communities, particularly low-income communities and communities of color.

Agriculture is the most destructive industry that we have. More than coal mining and other extractive industries.

It’s time for political leaders across the ideological spectrum to realize that, while partisanship is understandable, hyper-partisanship is destructive to our country. We need more visionary leaders who will earnestly strive for bipartisanship and finding policy solutions that can move America forward.

We tend to read each other’s books in sizeable chunks as they are written. I don’t know that you could say we are ruthless with each other – in fact, I suppose we are very kind. There are ways to make suggestions which are not destructive.

We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

There are two kinds of hecklers: the destructive and constructive hecklers.

The crippling health and economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis have been felt across Central Virginia. But in our communities of color, COVID-19’s spread has been particularly destructive.

Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.

The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.

Unless you are really grounded and have a true sense of reality, you can get lost in that and a lot of people do and that’s why you see so many people with successful careers but with destructive lives.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization. I’m just the first one to point it out publicly.

The biggest thing is separation from family. It’s a huge burden to carry and destructive in a lot of ways.

It doesn’t take much insight to realize that wars have been getting worse every time – worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total.

Success can be destructive to the creative process. I say it all the time: success is as dangerous as total failure.

Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.

Many environmental battles are won by delaying a destructive project long enough to change the conversation – to allow new economic, political and social dynamics to emerge.

But you say you are conservative – eminently conservative – while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?

The most destructive criticism is indifference.

Belief is such a powerful thing – but because it is, it can also be very destructive and it’s very easily manipulated.

Addiction is a hugely complex and destructive disease, and its impact can be simply devastating. All too often, lives and families can be shattered by it.

How can our hearts not break? How can we hold our tears? How can we bear the pain of losing those loving children and their guardians, who were slain in Newtown, Conn.? Why can’t we face the reality of our times and restrict deranged people from having these destructive powers?

Everything that’s bad for you catches on too quickly in America, because that’s the easiest thing to get people to invest in, the pursuits that are easy and destructive, the ones that bring out the least positive aspects of people.

You cannot have peaceful means – peaceful means will have to be used to bring about peaceful ends. If you use destructive means, you’re going to bring about destructive ends.

Be virtuous in thought and in deed. God has planted in you, for a purpose, a divine urge which may be easily subverted to evil and destructive ends.

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

‘The Hunger Games‘ takes place in Panem, a country which is part of America. It’s post-apocalyptic. There’s been a global war. The Panem country is what remains of this hugely destructive war.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately… you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.

I’m not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, but I am really concerned about the large-scale industrial fishing that engages in destructive practices like trawling and longlining.

Christians were regarded as separated from society and therefore destructive of the Greco-Roman way of life.

We have plenty of technologies we could use to destroy the planet, and we don’t. There’s more love on this planet than hate; there’s more creativity than destructive power.

The discussion about energy options tends to be an intensely emotional, polarised, mistrustful, and destructive one. Every option is strongly opposed: the public seem to be anti-wind, anti-coal, anti-waste-to-energy, anti-tidal-barrages, anti-carbon-tax, and anti-nuclear.

I don’t want my kids growing up believing that there is nothing destructive in the world.

My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it. That’s how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive.

I’m trying to find a way to eat up time without being destructive, ’cause that’s my go-to, it seems.

In a sacred ground like marriage, you find yourself out of it at certain times for reasons unknown that can be destructive. There could be a demon that kind of comes out and overtakes you.

Texas has been hit especially hard this year by a continuing drought, threatening high winds and increasingly destructive range fires. Simply, these conditions have lead to extremely adverse conditions in the agriculture industry.

Referring to ISIL as a destructive religious cult rather than a legitimate theo-political ‘radical Islamic’ group is not just more accurate, it also exposes ISIL’s corrupt religious narrative.

I think we’re often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself.

My first relationship at 15 made me really, really mature because it was so destructive and intense. We were inseparable for three years and I was completely and utterly besotted. But then it all fell apart and it took me a long time to get over it.

One of the things I learned in law school is that there’s nothing wrong or undesirable or dishonorable or destructive about amending the Constitution.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Ah! destructive Ignorance, what shall be done to chase thee out of the World!

Anger can be a useful emotion; it’s built into our genetic code to help with self preservation. But it can also be destructive, even when it is justified.

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons.

One of the main destructive forces within our family has been these runaway egos. I think if you look at any show business family, that struggle exists.

A spiritual partnership is between people who promise themselves to use all of their experiences to grow spiritually. They use their emotions to show them how to create constructive and healthy and joyful consequences instead of destructive and unhealthy and painful consequences.

A guy who’s actually self destructive is quite fun to play.

The way you dress or the car you drive or what you spend is to impress other people with how, I guess, successful and rich you are. But you’re not, and you shouldn’t, and who gives a damn what other people think anyway. So, that mentality, I think, is very destructive.

Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.

I’ve tried, in ‘Bloodmoney,’ to tell a story that gets at the crazy relationship between the ISI and the CIA, these absolutely fascinating, often mutually destructive two scorpions in a bottle kind of relationship that they have.