"Destructiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to disregard each other's personal comfort and welfare must now modify their views. Recent movements show that there is no such bargain, or else that the lawless Hun has broken it. He has attained little else by his destructiveness save the discomfort of H.Q. Otherwise the War progresses as merrily as ever; more merrily, perhaps, owing to the difficulties to be overcome. Soldiers love difficulties to overcome. That is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... clearer or more frank and comprehensive in its destructiveness than the revolutionary anarchism of Bakunin. He rejects all the ideal systems in every name and shape, from the idea of God downwards; and every form of external authority, whether emanating from the will of a sovereign or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... and 22 persons killed by them. From these returns it would appear that the bear is about four times as dangerous as the tiger, that the tiger is about three times as dangerous as the panther, and that the bear is about fourteen times as dangerous to man as the panther. As regards comparative destructiveness to animal life, I may observe in passing that the tiger seems to be more troublesome than the panther, and that Colonel Peyton records between 1878 and 1882 4,041 deaths of cattle killed by tigers ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... haphazard, as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to detail and after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death machine. Even the battles of Flanders in the autumn of '17, ghastly as they were in the losses of our men in the state of the ground through which they had to fight, and in futile results, were well ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the dogs seemed an insurmountable one. The Moravians' records abound in stories of their destructiveness. Mr. Hesketh Pritchard writes: "Dr. Grenfell records two children and one man killed by the dogs. This is fortunately a much less terrible record than that shown farther north by the Moravian Missions. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... "is no longer war; it is organized slaughter, perpetrated by a race suffering from dog-madness. I tremble at the thought that our own civilized and chivalrous people may at any moment be confronted with this lava flood of savagery and destructiveness. Now, if ever, the opportune moment has come for all civilized nations to join in protest, stiffened with a unanimous threat, against the continuance of such crimes against the human race. Europe ought surely ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of crumbling decay which speak more loudly to the visitor to Dublin of the decay and destruction of a nation than fieriest orator or solidest history. And in no part of Dublin have Death's effacing fingers worked with such destructiveness as in all the streets that surround the Green Street Court-House. Palatial mansions are windowless, grimy, hideous—with all the ghastly surroundings of tenement homes of ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... curious and far from pleasing peculiarities of the school, the intelligent and humane clergyman easily accounted for the spirit of destructiveness among the children; and his first step was to induce the teacher to take his leather from the end of the cane; and next, to turn the desks so that the boys sat with their backs to the windows, and the teacher's path lay on the other side of the room. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... The destructiveness of intertribal warfare, either organized or desultory, must have been recognized in Jurassic times, millions of years ago, by the reptiles of that period. Throughout the animal kingdom below man the blessings of peace now are thoroughly known. This first law ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... field, was filled with admiration for the stalwart "Rorys" and "Donalds" and "Sandys" as they strode along through the thick grass, cutting a wide swath before them. There was something in the work that appealed to the boy's bump of destructiveness, and filled him with eagerness to join ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... himself with the incubus of dream-states; while standing alone, he grows into a ferocious brigand. Poets call him romantic, but politicians are puzzled what to do with a being who to a senile mysticism joins the peevish destructiveness ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... me boldly, as if inquiring my business, rather than to seek for "show" points among those who require to be dragged from the back of the cart for inspection. Many people are debarred from walking foxhound pups from the tales they have heard about their destructiveness, but these yarns are grossly exaggerated, for the youngsters are no worse than ordinary puppies in their desire to try their new teeth on sponges, brushes, boots or anything else they can procure. If they are ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... did more—whether from mere animal destructiveness, or from the spark of humanity which was slowly rekindling in me, I began to delight in tearing up trees for its own sake. I tried my strength daily on thicker and thicker boles. I crawled up to the high palm-tops, and bowed ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... very nature of Being it could not be otherwise; and when we see this we see also that what has hitherto been wrong has not been the working of "the Father" but our conception of the existence of some other power, a power of negation, limitation, and destructiveness, the very opposite to all that the Creative Spirit, by the very fact of Its Creativeness, must be. That wonderful parable of the Prodigal Son shows us that he never ceased to be a son. It was not his Father who sent him away from home ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs— these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of the greatest ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... The destructiveness of this savage species was murderous. Jones came upon one old Tom's den, where there was a pile of nineteen elk, mostly yearlings. Only five or six had been eaten. Jones hunted this old fellow for months, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... inspired by the passions which found their climax in the destructiveness of civil war,—and especially in considering such magnificent outbursts as Mr. Beecher's oration at Fort Sumter, intelligence will seek to free itself alike from sympathy and from prejudice that it may the better judge the effect of the general mind of the people on the orator, and the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... interest in science was so great that she unwittingly pulled two or three extremely rare specimens to pieces while listening to these eloquent discourses, and was only made conscious of her wickedness by a laughing remark from Hector that she "must surely have the bump of destructiveness ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... which it has been inferred that he drew away from them as he grew older. It is very likely that years and widened experience of men may have produced in him their natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more generous side of Puritanism I think he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of clerical worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in "Mother Hubberd's Tale," published in 1591.[291] There is an iconoclastic relish in his account ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... each worth, as I found out later, about four dollars; and I confess I found a peculiar satisfaction in the destruction of property belonging to a State which had deprived me of all my effects except underclothes. But my destructiveness was due to a variety of causes. It was occasioned primarily by a "pressure of activity," for which the tearing of druggets served as a vent. I was in a state of mind aptly described in a letter written during my first ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... familiar with all the universe, and with man as a small part of it. He understood human institutions, and blew them about like soap bubbles. It was surprising that so much destructiveness could be contained in one human mind. Was it government? The purpose of government was the guarding of property-rights, the perpetuation of ancient force and modern fraud. Or was it marriage? Marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation of ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... the frightful destructiveness of war been more strikingly illustrated. The commerce of the United States was completely crippled by the blockade of her ports, her revenue falling from $24,000,000 to $8,000,000. Admiral Cockburn, of the British Navy, swept the Atlantic coast with his fleet, destroying ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... adhering to the people, teeming with the distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... healthy, rollicking lad, with power plus, and a deal of destructiveness in his nature. But destructiveness in a youngster is only energy not yet properly directed, just as dirt is useful matter in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... helped by conventional treatment. Most of them rapidly became social problems after discharge. It seemed the mental hospital's only ethically defensible function was incarceration—providing temporary relief for the family and community from the mentally ill person's destructiveness. ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... your attention to all the destructiveness of the enemy's works, for you know it, and I again point to the attack of the Devil on Christ and His Church. This has been the attack from the beginning, and God will not countenance the destruction ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... some of his blows, and Mary's incredulity was only heightened by a display of the young man's muscles. She extolled these because she thought it was her duty to do so, but preserved some doubts of their unique destructiveness. Once she asked him could he fight a policeman, and he assured her that policemen are not able to fight at all singly, but only in squads, when their warfare is callous and ugly and conducted mainly with their boots; so that decent ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... excusable, for the simple reason that the dirigible, above all, is a fair-weather craft, and disasters, which had overtaken these vessels time after time, rendered prudence imperative. Moreover, but little was known of the range and destructiveness of anti-aircraft guns. ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... building in Holland and the richest in historic memories. For here lived Charlemagne and Charles the Bald, Charles the Bold and Maximilian of Austria. The palace might still be standing were it not for the destructiveness of the French at the end of the eighteenth century. A picture by Jan van Goyen in the stadhuis gives an idea of the Valkhof in his day, before vandalism had ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... say that these sudden storms were diurnal in their nature, and frequently of great fury and destructiveness, so the following morning he moved all his belongings into the grotto, as he liked best to call the cave, and set up housekeeping in a manner that no hurricane, however severe, ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... important, inasmuch as their stage of evolution is higher, and the existence of a nervous system brings the possibility of suffering, suffering which certain influences[21] either diminish or suppress altogether, when caused by animal destructiveness, but which may become intense when it is man who ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... history will dismiss the suggestion as Utopian. 'Nationality', they will say, 'revealed itself first as a constructive force, and Europe staked its future upon it; but now that we are committed to it, it has developed a sinister destructiveness which we cannot remedy. Nationality brought the Balkan States into being and led them to final victory over the Turk in 1912, only to set them tearing one another to pieces again in 1913. In the present ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... by the lakes and noted the marshy spot where he had shot the ducks. Others had come back and were feeding there now on the water grasses. Doubtless they had never seen man before and did not know his full destructiveness, but Robert resolved to have duck for his ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the relations between them to enable us to continually make the needful adjustments to keep ourselves going. Now, in appearance this is exceedingly specious. It looks so entirely reasonable that we do not see its ultimate destructiveness; and so we are told that Eve ate the fruit because she "saw that the tree was pleasant to the eyes." But careful consideration will show us in what the destructive nature of this principle consists. It is based on the fallacy that good is limited ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... was fascinated. Here was the secret of the terrible destructiveness of The Archer's tiny missiles. He noted the extreme care which the woman took that none of the matter should touch her hands, and once when a particle spattered upon one of her fingers he saw her plunge the member into a vessel of water and ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "Outre-Mer." He, too, after having noted that our education merely produces narrow-minded bourgeois, lacking in initiative and will-power, or anarchists—"those two equally harmful types of the civilised man, who degenerates into impotent platitude or insane destructiveness"—he too, I say, draws a comparison that cannot be the object of too much reflection between our French lycees (public schools), those factories of degeneration, and the American schools, which prepare a man admirably for life. The ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... wantonly amused himself at a dinner party in Trinity, in smashing with filberts (discharged in showers like grape-shot) a most costly dessert set of cut glass, from which Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued a principle of destructiveness in his cerebellum. Now, if this dessert set belonged to some poor suffering Trinitarian, and not to himself, we are of opinion that he was faulty, and ought, upon his own great subsequent maxim, to have been coerced into "indemnity for the past, and security for the future." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the Indians hurried across the tongue of land for the canoe and paddles it around to the camp, the rest of the party dragged the dead wolverine back to the scene of his depredations. Here they had an opportunity of seeing the destructiveness of this animal. Every pound of meat had been removed from the "cache," and so cunningly hid away that not one piece could be found except the one which Alec had seen him hide as he watched him through his telescope, and this piece was so permeated by the offensive ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... England!" But the sulky giant is not stirred. "Let England's trade go to pot," he says; "what have I to lose?" And England is powerless. The capacity of her workmen is represented by 1, in comparison with the 2.25 capacity of the American workman. And because of the solidarity of labor and the destructiveness of strikes, British capitalists dare not even strive to emulate the enterprise of American capitalists. So England watches trade slipping through her fingers and wails unavailingly. As a correspondent writes: "The enormous power of the trade unions hangs, a sullen cloud, over ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... worst. Those who will trust their skins, and their eyes, and their clothes to 'Vesuvians,' 'Flamers,' and the like, are not to be pitied; for they are more cruel to their tobacco than the fusees are to them. Our grievance is that so many engines of destructiveness and offensiveness should be so largely patronized by smokers, to their own discomfort, the ruination of their tobacco, the scandalization of gentle and simple, and the encouragement of vicious manufactures. Now, we are not going to particularize too closely, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings |
