"Destructiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... John,—adding, argumentatively, "As to the 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 off these young fellows' hats, and preparing them for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... animals, they have a keen sense of danger, and when a certain whoop is given, however scattered or tempted to stay, in a few moments they are hidden on the tops of the highest trees in the locality. They have the bump of destructiveness largely developed, and it is no small calamity when a tribe locates itself near a village. Scarcely anything in the shape of fruit or grain comes amiss to them, and when neither are to be had, in the hottest part of the year they ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... it, (pure religion.) The other sentiments may be briefly enumerated, their names being sufficient in general to denote their functions— firmness, hope, cautiousness, self-esteem, love of approbation, secretiveness, marvellousness, constructiveness, imitation, combativeness, destructiveness, concentrativeness, adhesiveness, love of the opposite sex, love of offspring, alimentiveness, and love of life. Through these faculties, man is connected with the external world, and supplied with active impulses to maintain his place in it as an individual and as a species. There is ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... to add, however, that this fact should not lead to an under-estimation of the possibilities of insect destructiveness, nor encourage lax methods in dealing with injurious species. In the beginning of any nut-growing enterprise we should anticipate the coming of insect pests and be ready to meet them. The planting of pure stands of native nut trees sets up a condition under which ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... scourge of lumber-camps in big-game territory, the mining camps and the railroad-builders is a long story, and if told in detail it would make several chapters. Their awful destructiveness is well known. It is a common thing for "the boss" to hire a hunter to kill big game to supply the hungry outfit, and save beef ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... know them, but I feel that it can see me. Or rather that it is aware of me with a sense sharper than vision itself. It is very near now. Oh God, the malevolence, the hate—the potentiality of awful, fearsome destructiveness that is its very essence! ...
— There is a Reaper ... • Charles V. De Vet
... 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 from universal suffrage. "The liberty ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... inimitable humor and Dr. Shaw closed the meeting with one of her strongest speeches. The addresses of Mrs. Catt and Dr. Shaw emphasized not only the desire of women to do effective patriotic service in time of stress but also their wish that a more civilized way than by the waste and destructiveness of war might be found to settle ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... the current above overtakes the slower foot-hill portion below it, and all sweeping forward together with a high, overcurling front, debouches on the open plain with a violence and suddenness that at first seem wholly unaccountable. The destructiveness of the lower portion of this particular flood was somewhat augmented by mining gravel in the river channels, and by levees which gave way after having at first restrained and held back the accumulating waters. ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... 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 of ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... out the party by a stray band of Blackfeet or Crees was an undertaking that would need no explaining. But why should any one do such a foolish, wasteful thing as this, one to so little purpose in its destructiveness? ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... port of New York. She desisted at Washington's request. But a waiting cruiser, plain to the eye, interfering with shipping to prevent communication with Germany, was a mild offender compared with an unseen submarine crossing the paths of ships and liable to err in its indiscriminate destructiveness. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Pitt 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, besides that this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... yourself in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles. I wonder if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim. An extra convolution, No. 9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of "organs." Professor Bumpus is seated in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to discover that the means of life are the really valuable things, they will go on to learn, what primitive races, hard-pressed races, races making their way in the world against heavy odds, have always known—that at all costs the insatiable destructiveness of Death must be compensated for by Birth. If the means of life are the real wealth, the life itself is more real still, and unless we abolish death, the makers and bearers and nourishers of life are at all times and everywhere the producers, the manufacturers, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... have Whinnie and Struthers remove the tell-tale skeleton to the bunk-house. Before that transfer could be effected, however, the Dour Man invaded the living-room and stood with a cold and accusatory eye inspecting that monument of destructiveness. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... to another phase of destructiveness in the mycelium of fungi, which traverse the soil and interfere most injuriously with the growth of shrubs and trees. The reader of journals devoted to horticulture will not fail to notice the constant appeals for advice ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... creates a livelier demand for ships, so it also creates a greater demand for all the ordinary commodities of living: and just as war by destroying ships reduces the available supply, so by its general destructiveness it reduces the supply of other commodities: and just as war by destroying ships makes extraordinary profits for shipowners, so by destroying tables and teacups it makes unusual profits for the makers of tables ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... was a 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
... region of trees, so it was a particularly welcome sight. He started the fire close to it. It happened to be too near; the pitch caught fire, and presently the trunk was encircled with flame. He was desperate to think that he should have been guilty of an act of "such wanton destructiveness," as he called it,—especially as it was the last fine tree on the road. He abandoned all idea of dinner, and did nothing through that fiery noon, when we could hardly stir from the shade,—which we found farther off,—but rush between the ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... Every passing sportsman would fill her with duck-shot, and every strolling gentleman would step out of his way to smite off her head with his cane, as one decapitates a thistle. But in the drawing-room one lays off his destructiveness with his hat and gloves, and the Young Person enjoys the same immunity that a sleepy mastiff grants to the worthless kitten campaigning against ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... 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 ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... battle had begun in grim earnest. The Indians, dreading the destructiveness of the guns and the Gatlings, had made up their minds to capture them. As if by a preconcerted signal a large number of them leapt from their cover, and with wild, piercing whoops and war-cries, made a rush on the battery. Some of them were on horseback, and actually had ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... competition for jobs when soldiers return from war. 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
... 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 ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... filthy—surrounded by all those signs 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
... 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. The savage dogs did great harm at those stations ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... 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, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... gratifying sight. The great green-clothed mountains looked down serenely on these two examples of man's handiwork and man's destructiveness; the blue sea dashed itself to foam against the coral-bound coast; and the bright ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... that the whole colour of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The most terrible plague 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 ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... machine was the thing to think of now. He could do much with that if he could but get his hands upon it. Within the little hardwood case hidden in the cabin table rested sufficient potential destructiveness to wipe out in the fraction of a second every enemy ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... necessity of continually increasing care and thoroughness of inspection on the part of the insurance companies. These agencies, in fact, must compel the insured to keep up to the mark in the introduction of every improvement to ward off fires or diminish their destructiveness. The progress made in this department during recent years has been great. The almost universal use of steam has been attended by the fitting up of factories with force pumps, hose, and all the appliances of a modern fire brigade; dangerous rooms are metal sheathed, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... Destructiveness!" cried Gethryn, tossing his mask and field glass onto a chair, where they were appropriated by Clifford, who spent the next half hour in staring across at good old Colonel Toddlum and his frisky companion — an attention which drove the poor old gentleman almost frantic with suspicion, for he was ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... account of the nearness of some of the log-heaps to the house, but care is always taken to fire them with the wind blowing in a direction away from the building. Accidents have sometimes happened, but they are of rarer occurrence than might be expected, when we consider the subtlety and destructiveness of the element employed ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the oratory 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 ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... African: prisoners are tortured with all the horrible barbarity of that human wild beast which is happily being extirpated, the North American Indian; and children may be seen greedily licking the blood from the ground. It is a curious ethnological study, this peculiar development of destructiveness in the African brain. Cruelty seems to be with him a necessary of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death. His religious rites—a strong contrast to those of the modern Hindoo—are ever causelessly ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power Cobbe wrote in the Contemporary Review that loss of faith in God would bring about the secularisation or destruction of all cathedrals, churches, and chapels. "Why," I wrote in answer, "should cathedrals, churches, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant |
