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Destruction Quotes

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Destruction Quotes

“The most important feature of an information economy, in which information is defined as surprise, is the overthrow, not the attainment, of equilibrium. The science that we have come to know as information theory establishes the supremacy of the entrepreneur because it appreciates the powerful connection between destruction and what Schumpeter described as "creative destruction," between chaos and creativity.”

“If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.”

“It's hard to overemphasize how important Ford's deregulation was. True, most of the benefits took years to unfold-rail freight rates, for example hardly budged at first. Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.”

“This whole theory [of John Law and Jean Terrasson], as dear to French financial schemers in the eighteenth century as to American "Greenbackers" in the nineteenth, had resulted, under the Orleans Regency and Louis XV, in ruin to France financially and morally, had culminated in the utter destruction of all prosperity, the rooting out of great numbers of the most important industries, and the grinding down of the working people even to starvation.”

“Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.”

“The evil genius of terrorism is that that maximizes unfamiliarity, imaginability, suffering, scale of destruction, unfairness. It's really important to understand why terrorism is so frightening because it is a psychological war and until you understand it and try to reduce the dread, until then you become like a force multiplier for the terrorists inadvertently because you'll tend to overreact to terrorist attacks because the dread factor is so high.”

“If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world.”

“There is a political process which we are trying to achieve through what is called the Vienna Group. That involves the establishment of a governing council, which is to take power away from Bashar Assad, to write a constitution and to open the way for elections. It is important that Bashar leaves in the beginning, not at the end of the process. This will make the transition happen with less death and destruction.”

“One of our objectives today is very important for many people, for millions of people on our planet - it is joining efforts in the fight against terrorism and other similar challenges: countering drug trafficking and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, fighting famine, preserving environment and biodiversity, taking efforts to make the world more predictable, more stable.”

“It was important for me to show that Beirut and Lebanon were once the pearl of the Middle East. Beirut was once called the Paris of the Middle East and to have that feeling of a destroyed place that once was beautiful and glamorous and visually impressive was important. I think it's even sadder to get the feeling that this country, and indeed the whole Middle East, could have been a major force in the world if people would get together and forget about destruction, death and wars. But unfortunately, it's not happening yet.”

“I think morality is more important than ever before. As we gain more power, the question of what we do with it becomes more and more crucial, and we are very close to really having divine powers of creation and destruction. The future of the entire ecological system and the future of the whole of life is really now in our hands. And what to do with it is an ethical question and also a scientific question.”

“For me it's really important that the work here displays an aesthetic of decay along with the sunken boat with the broken ceramic pieces. They form a unity in showing the power of destruction, the beauty of destruction, whether it's from nature - because the boat has sunk - or through other forces. It's really the beauty of decay and death that holds a power here.”

“I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.”

“At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly, but they have provided the world with some of its most important innovations. Creation and destruction join together once more.”

“The Kennedy Administration's public pronouncements on the matter suggested that the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Castro's Cuba would represent an unacceptable strategic threat to the United States. . . . This urgent transformation of Cuba into an important strategic base - by the presence of these large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass-destruction - constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas. . . .”