"Destructiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... love to cut." And Maud's, face brightened; for destructiveness is one of the earliest traits of childhood, and ripping was ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... the mysterious vitality of sin, and the subtle kinship of one form of sin with other forms, and its destructiveness when it seizes on a life or poisons an atmosphere, that helps us more than anything else to feel the force and the intensity of the Saviour's prayer for us: "Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast given Me. I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... been in a wolf pack. Great crimes were committed there, crimes so dark that their very hideousness protects them from exposure. During a decade and a half, while Mahdism controlled the country, there flourished a tyranny which for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even imagine. The keystones of the Mahdist party were religious intolerance and slavery, with murder and the most abominable cruelty as ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... Conflation for the reverse process? That in the earliest ages, when the Church did not include in her ranks so much learning as it has possessed ever since, the wear and tear of time, aided by unfaith and carelessness, made itself felt in many an instance of destructiveness which involved a temporary chipping of the Sacred Text all through the Holy Gospels? And, in fact, that Conflation at least as an extensive process, if not altogether, ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... cumulus clouds have formed, the upper surfaces of which have caught all the sun's heat, intensifying the unstable equilibrium of the air. The powers of the tempest have grown steadily in all evil majesty of destructiveness. Day by day, then hour by hour, then minute by minute, the awful force has been generated, as steam is generated by fierce furnace fires ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... to Live. * Alimentiveness. 1. Destructiveness. 2. Amativeness. 3. Philoprogenitiveness. 4. Adhesiveness. 5. Inhabitiveness. 6. Combativeness. 7. Secretiveness. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... something still more precious, the preservation of the law-abiding spirit. Other organizations will not be slow to profit by the lesson of their success; and we shall have Heaven knows how many causes seeking to attain their ends by destructiveness and resistance. Similarly, the more serious and menacing rebellion of labor against law must be firmly controlled; much as we may sympathize with their grievances, we cannot countenance the attempt to remedy them by violence. The Industrial Workers ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... parliamentary government—a doorkeeper in the Houses of Parliament. They used to meet at Gaspard's lodgings, regret, in tones as loud as prudence permitted, the abuses of the status quo, spend a social evening, and return to the outer world with a tickling sense of mystery and potential destructiveness. Gaspard held the very lowest opinion of them; he acknowledged that the "propaganda by action" took small root in New Lindsey, and when it came into his head that Mr. Benham was worse than superfluous, he admitted with a shrug the great difficulties that lay in the way of removing his acquaintance. ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... sportsman's organ of destructiveness (for he had never forgotten little Jay's lesson on that head), but probably a growing dislike to the constant diet of pork, that urged him to an unrelenting pursuit. Cautiously he crept through the thickets, having wafted an unavailing sigh for the pointer he had left at Dunore, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... have little faith," Fischer observed, "in any new explosives. In Germany they believe, I understand, that the limit of destructiveness has ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 against 1,617 killed by panthers. The bison (gavoeus ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... outburst that expelled Louis Philippe from the throne, the Louvre was in some danger of destruction. Destructiveness is a native element of human nature, however repressed by society; and hence every great revolutionary movement always brings to the surface some who are for indiscriminate demolition. Moreover there is a strong tendency in the popular mind, where art and beauty have ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swooped at the close of 1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness and the panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its visitation have been amply justified by modern research. Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its repeated visitations. ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... by continual experience of captures about the neighboring shores; the enemies' crews even landing at times. When he went to Bermuda two months later, so many privateers were met on the line of traffic between the West Indies and the St. Lawrence as to convince him of the number and destructiveness of these vessels, and "of the impossibility of our trade navigating these seas unless a very extensive squadron is employed to scour the vicinity." He was crippled for attempting this by the size ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... in his hands. The rifle was useless against such a monster, of course, but it is quaint to reflect that in that automatic rifle, firing hexynitrate bullets, each equivalent to a six-pounder T.N.T. shell in destructiveness, Sergeant Walpole carried greater "fire-power" than ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... that can draw, even faintly, such a picture—its terror, its immensity, its horrors, its destructiveness, its surpassal of all earthly experience and imagination? And this human ant-hill, the world, how insignificant would it be in the grasp of such a catastrophe! Its laws, its temples, its libraries, its religions, its armies, its mighty nations, would ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... produces a mechanical effect, it is by so impinging on the calorific ether as to produce the motion of heat, which is instantly thereafter converted into mechanical force. It is not so much the greatness of the amount of this mechanical force which gives it its peculiar destructiveness, as the inequality of its strain; not so much the quantity of matter projected, as the velocity of the blow. One may have his brains blown out by a bullet of air as well as one of lead, if the air only blows hard enough and to one point. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... In point of destructiveness, I should think there was little to choose between them. One thinks of the hundreds of villages the corsairs devastated; the convents and precious archives they destroyed, [Footnote: In this particular branch, again, the Christians surpassed the unbeliever. More archives were ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... and the most destructive of those which have corrupted and infected public life in the country. These two—the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Irish Republican Brotherhood—have in common the secrecy of their operations and the destructiveness of their aims. Their influence is marked not only by despotic and tyrannical government, but, what may be even more mischievous from the point of view of the community, by the deliberate persecution ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the half-hearted. We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to historical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an impassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller, and such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness. But here the legacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of the nineteenth is speaking in us: and moreover, in his own person, the very fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the past and its contingent ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... upon this interesting relic ensued; and, some difference of opinion arising respecting the real character of the deceased gentleman, Mr. Blubb delivered a lecture upon the cranium before him, clearly showing that Mr. Greenacre possessed the organ of destructiveness to a most unusual extent, with a most remarkable development of the organ of carveativeness. Sir Hookham Snivey was proceeding to combat this opinion, when Professor Ketch suddenly interrupted the proceedings by exclaiming, with great excitement ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... had 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." But, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... and what they said. Did you hear anything said by the owners of the property that was burning? Go on and trace the progress of the fire, describing its change in volume and color. Try at all times to make your reader see the beauty and fierceness and destructiveness of the fire. You might close your theme with the putting out of the fire, or perhaps you will prefer to speak of the appearance of the ruins by daylight. When you have finished your theme, read it over, ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... berry question, I might answer it with a gem from Dr. Watts, relative to 'Satan' and idle hands,' but will merely say, that, as a matter of public safety, you'd better leave me alone; for such is the destructiveness of my nature, that I shall certainly eat something hurtful, break something valuable, or sit upon something crushable, unless you let me concentrate my energies by knocking on these young fellows' hats, and preparing them for ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... back through history, and as we look abroad through our land and through all civilized lands, one of the most conspicuous facts concerning the powers of sex is their frightful destructiveness. The spectacle of wasted manhood and womanhood, of depleted powers in body, mind, and soul, is in history and in present society appalling. It is so oppressive that it has driven many thoughtful men and women to despair. Men otherwise ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... not draw 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 of His Church. ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... This form of limitation of numbers works to the advantage of labor as long as it is available, but great disasters are not constantly in operation while the worker's reproductive ability is. So in a few years they have lost what nature's destructiveness won ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... growing grass and bushes prevented destructive floods, except, perhaps, on exceptional occasions. Now, however, the flood of each year is more disastrous than that of the preceding year, and in the flood of February, 1891, the culminating point of intensity and destructiveness was reached. On this occasion the water rose in some places over 20 feet, with a corresponding broadening in other places, and flowed with such velocity that for several weeks it was impossible to cross the river. As a result of these floods, the grassy banks that once distinguished ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... dwindle into insignificance before it! We again repeat, nothing but slavery is worthy to be compared for its horrors with this monstrous system of iniquity. As we write, we are amazed at the enormity of its unprincipledness, and the large extent of its destructiveness. Its very enormity seems in some measure to protect it. Were it a minor evil, it seems as though one might grapple with it. As it is, it is beyond the compass of our grasp. No words are adequate to expose its evil, no fires ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that the politicians and societies of England who had given it their sympathy had given their sympathy to measures and to theories opposed to every principle of 1688. Above all, he laid bare that agency of riot and destructiveness which, even within the first few months of the Revolution, filled him with presentiment of the calamities about to fall upon France. Burke's treatise was no dispassionate inquiry into the condition of a neighbouring state: it was a denunciation of Jacobinism as fierce and as little qualified ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... 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
... made in the form of an interrogation, to which Harry responded that he had not yet observed anything of the kind, nor had his attention been called to it. Ned remarked that he had been told of the destructiveness of this worm, but had not yet seen anything ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of them could ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... another boy who exercised the same kind of cruelty and destructiveness over another common a few miles distant. Walking across it I spied two boys among the furze bushes, and at the same moment they saw me, whereupon one ran away and the other remained standing. A nice little fellow of about eight, he looked as if he had been crying. I asked him what ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... adult beetles is more easily detected on the foliage than is that of the larvae on the roots, for the feeding beetles ravenously devour the upper sides of the leaves, leaving chain-like markings, shown in Fig. 39, their destructiveness decreasing somewhat after a few days from their first appearance. A fortnight after the beetles begin their attack on the foliage the female begins laying her eggs, to the number of 200, placing them under the rough bark of trunk and cane. These hatch in late ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick |
