Desecration Quotes

My relationship to the desecration of the earth was very theoretical and intellectual until I got sick. I could never watch anything about polar bears dying or the death of bees. There were certain things I knew I couldn't go near because they were too devastating. But I don't think until I got cancer did I get it in my body, what was happening to the earth. I finally went: "Oh! Earth! Organism!" ~ Eve Ensler

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life. ~ Franz Wright

An argument could be made that the ultimate desecration of the human body is to end its earthly usefulness, which would imply that all murderers share equally that specific charge. ~ Lyndsay Faye

Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it. ~ Adolf Hitler

Flag desecration is not a constitutional issue for the courts. It is a political one that belongs to the people. ~ Larry Craig

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity. ~ Joseph Conrad

After Independence, Uganda -- A European artefact -- was still forming as a country rather than a kingdom in the minds of ordinary Gandas. They were lulled by the fact that Kabaka Muteesa II was made president of the new Uganda. Nonetheless most of them felt that 'Uganda' should remain a kingdom for the Ganda under their kabaka so that things would go back to the way things were before the Europeans came. Uganda was a patchwork of fifty or so tribes. The Ganda did not want it. The union of tribes brought no apparent advantage to them apart from a deluge of immigrants from wherever, coming to Kampala to take their land. Meanwhile, the other fifty or so tribes looked on flabbergasted as the British drew borders and told them that they were now Ugandans. Their histories, cultures and identities were overwritten by the mispronounced name of an insufferably haughty tribe propped above them. But to the Ganda, the reality of Uganda as opposed to Buganda only sank in when, after independence, Obote overran the kabakas lubiri with tanks, exiling Muteesa and banning all kingdoms. The desecration of their kingdom by foreigners paralyzed the Ganda for decades. ~ Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration. ~ Atom Egoyan

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want. ~ Wendell Berry

And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else's loved ones or someone else's children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory. ~ Arundhati Roy

The clouds were flying fast, the wind was coming up in gusts, banging some neighboring shutters that had broken loose, twirling the rusty chimney-cowls and weathercocks, and rushing round and round a confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to blow the dead citizens out of their graves. The low thunder, muttering in all quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for this attempted desecration, and to mutter, Let them rest! Let them rest! ~ Charles Dickens

What could he say? After the phone calls and the beating. After the desecration of his locker. The silent treatment. Pushed downstairs. What they did to Goober, to Brother Eugene. What guys like Archie and Janza did to the school. What they would do to the world when they left Trinity. ~ Robert Cormier

This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, "laughter and ability and Sighing, And Frocks and Curls." All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself. ~ William Styron

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

For me to make lasagna would be a desecration of a great Italian dish ... I don't mess with sacred things. ~ Mario Cuomo

Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women - that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life ~ Eve Ensler

I once wrote a book about George Orwell, who might have been my hero if I had heroes, and was upset by his callousness about the burning of churches in Catalonia in 1936. Sophocles showed, well before the rise of monotheism, that Antigone spoke for humanity in her revulsion against desecration. I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head. ~ Christopher Hitchens

11 The earth was depraved and putrid in God's sight, and the land was filled with violence (desecration, infringement, outrage, assault, and lust for power). 12 And God looked upon the world and saw how degenerate, debased, and vicious it was, for all humanity had corrupted their way upon the earth and lost their true direction. ~ Anonymous

We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so, we dilute the freedom this cherished emblem represents. ~ William J. Brennan Jr.

I am thankful for the strong, united response of our university community to the desecration of the James Meredith statue last year, confirming our university values of civility and respect. what it is saying is that the only possible justice for a black in the state of Mississippi is the federal government and if there's anything that we don't need it's that being our only means of expecting justice. ~ James Meredith

It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did. ~ Richard Lamm

Unfortunately a Constitutional amendment that would have empowered Congress to make desecration of the United States flag illegal failed to pass by one vote. ~ Kenny Marchant

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands. ~ Wendell Berry

Is desecration teaching?
Is violence knowledge? Is haunting
a kind of life? I had no model
for rebirth. No second coming blueprint. ~ Amber Dawn

In your present state, Chosen, Desecration lies ahead of you. It does not crowd at your back. ~ Stephen R. Donaldson

I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planet;As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration. ~ Theodore Roethke

The Sphinx is missing a nose. Someone shot it off in a moment of idle desecration - some say it was Mameluke Turks, others, Napoleonic soldiers. ~ Carl Sagan

Many people under the influence of science, and particularly neuro-nonsense, will say the sacred is an old concept, it's just a hangover, but you can easily see that's not so, because everyone has a sense of desecration: there are things everybody values which, when they are spoiled are not just moved or destroyed, they are desecrated. Something that is vital not just to you but the world. People have this sense when they see their towns pulled apart and concrete blocks put in the middle of them. You only have to look at Aberdeen to see what happens to a beautiful place when the desecrators get their hands on it. ~ Roger Scruton

Actually 'bad' doesn't do justice to my handwriting. Neither does 'handwriting.' 'Desecration of paper' about covers it. ~ Mark Barrowcliffe

The revulsion towards and violent detachment from nature leads to its desecration, to the destruction of the organic conception of the world as a cosmos, as an order of forms reflecting a higher meaning, as the 'visible manifestation of the invisible' - a conception (of Indo-European origin) which is an integral part of the Classical view of the world and which also lies at the basis of various forms of knowledge of a different sort compared to profane, modern science. ~ Julius Evola

One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total PROFANATION: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing OF the world, and not just a thing IN the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it. That is what we see in the spreading addiction to pornography - a profanation that removes the sexual bond entirely from the realm of intrinsic values. It involves wiping out one area in which the idea of the beautiful had taken root, so as to protect ourselves from the possibility of love it and therefore losing it. ~ Roger Scruton

The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar. ~ Chris Hedges

Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered. ~ William J. Brennan

I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community and also, why not? this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration. ~ Isabel Allende