"Self-destructive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sets them in opposition to each other. If they affect art, they say that the decay in artistic expression is due to the decay in ethics, that art when shut away from the human interests and from the great mass of humanity is self-destructive. They tell their elders with all the bitterness of youth that if they expect success from them in business or politics or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run, they must let them consult all of humanity; that they must let them ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Democracy can effect. This would be my conception of the large idea of the campaign. It involves much more than the League of Nations. This is our hour of test. We must not be little in our conception of ourselves, nor yet have a conceit that is self-destructive. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... one of the best American colleges, of excellent taste in the matter of clothes, friends, and the details of living with which he chose to surround himself, but at heart a rake. He loved, and had from his youth up, to gamble. He was in one phase of the word a HARD and yet by no means a self-destructive drinker, for he had an iron constitution and could consume spirituous waters with the minimum of ill effect. He had what Gibbon was wont to call "the most amiable of our vices," a passion for women, and he cared ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... unscientific, because they seek to alter the natural environment of man; they are immoral because, by interfering with the individual, they produce the most aggressive forms of egotism; they are ignorant, because they try to spread education; they are self-destructive, because they engender anarchy. 'Of old,' he tells us, 'the Yellow Emperor first caused charity and duty to one's neighbour to interfere with the natural goodness of the heart of man. In consequence of this, Yao and Shun wore the hair off their legs in endeavouring to feed their ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... determines in what particular direction these requisites of production shall be applied, the hope of the future of our industry is seen to rest largely upon the confident belief that the working classes will use their higher wages not to draw interest from investments (a self-destructive policy) but to raise their standard of life by the current satisfaction of all those wholesome desires of body and mind which lie latent under an "economy of low wages." The satisfaction of new good human desires, by endowing life with more hope and interest, will ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... life, imagined himself to derive an artistic pleasure from watching the picturesque extreme of wrongheadedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction may drive a man. "It is like madness. It must be—because it's self-destructive," Decoud had said to himself often. It seemed to him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to destroy. But he enjoyed the bitter flavour of that example with the zest of a connoisseur in the art of his choice. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad |
