Destructive

Famous quotes containing the word destructive:

    Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.
    William Blake (1757–1827)

    [U]nless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Sadism and masochism, in Freud’s final formulation, are fusions of Eros and the destructive instincts. Sadism represents a fusion of the erotic instincts and the destructive instincts directed outwards, in which the destructiveness has the character of aggressiveness. Masochism represents the fusion of the erotic instincts and the destructive instincts turned against oneself, the aim of the latter being self-destruction.
    Patrick Mullahy (b. 1912)