Self Destruction Quotes

The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction. ~ Hanif Kureishi

The quickest path to self-destruction is to push away the people you love. ~ Cassia Leo

Revenge can only be found on the road to self-destruction. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

June 16, 2018

I feel lovely, but it's just the drugs. But sometimes I think that maybe it isn't just the drugs? Maybe these feelings are inside of us all along, and the drugs find them. Maybe that's why some people choose to be junkies because they choose to believe that they're worthy of happiness. And maybe some of us like the pain so much that we numb it in order for us to really understand it. To put these suicidal feelings to sleep and fall in love with the way we fall in love with the stars within us. I think self-destruction is the most addictive thing. There's something very powerful and magical about it. ~ Juansen Dizon

The worst threat to man is man himself ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

A millenarian fire burned in Oppenheimer's spirit, fueled by his pride as a world-historical individual, by his fear that the natural force he loosed upon the world would escape all human control, and by a pure-hearted longing to ensure that his discovery of the devastation latent in the elemental substance of the world would serve concord rather than the ultimate discord, perpetual peace rather than permanent self-destruction. ~ Algis Valiunas

To Live In The Original Intention Of God Is To Chase Self Destruction Away ~ Sunday Adelaja

She didn't want to explain the recklessness, the pleasure of making the bad choice, the glory of at least this once, picking her own path to damnation. ~ Holly Black

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction. ~ Ravi Zacharias

To try to keep Bimala as a garland round my neck, would have meant keeping a weight hanging over my heart. Have I not been praying with all my strength, that if happiness may not be mine, let it go; if grief needs must be my lot, let it come; but let me knot be kept in bondage. To clutch hold of that which is untrue as though it were true, is only to throttle oneself. May I be saved from such self-destruction. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Prometheus gave us fire and we use it to light cigarettes. ~ Marty Rubin

He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual's armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world's chaos and warfare. ~ Gay Talese

Often,our immediate reaction to a sudden crisis help us save ourselves. Our response to gradual crises that creep up upon us, on the other hand,may be so adaptive as to ultimately lead to self-destruction. ~ Amish Tripathi

This is how it has always been with me. Give me something good, I'll destroy it. Love me, I'll destroy you. I have never felt deserving of anything in my life. ~ James Frey

Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction. ~ Greg Bear

Maybe she wasn't on a path toward anything so dramatic as self-destruction, but hers was still a slow wasting, fading day by day, becoming more of a ghost with every breath she expelled and didn't draw in again. Ghosts only haunted people, powerless to do anything. She'd made herself powerless, and didn't know how to feel about that. ~ Cole McCade

When we don't put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions. ~ Zeena Schreck

An almost infallible means of saving yourself from the desire of self-destruction is always to have something to do.
Creech, the commentator on Lucretius, marked upon his manuscripts: "N. B. Must hang myself when I have finished." He kept his word with himself that he might have the pleasure of ending like his author. If he had undertaken a commentary upon Ovid he would have lived longer. ~ Voltaire

The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

My desire to self-destruct is a one-night stand
on Groundhog Day.
Fucking repetitive. Repetitively fucking. ~ Kris Kidd

In just two years, CSAS ignited the flame Grandmother lit years before. Carl would never succeed in his attempts to extinguish it. But his parental authority was able to keep it dormant and unthreatening for several years. At Ooltewah High School, I was like a lion forced into captivity after a liberating romp in the jungle. Nothing challenged me. Nothing motivated me. Nothing moved me. My claustrophobia itched to the point where clawing at my own skin seemed to be my only method of relief. With no social outlets and no intellectual nourishment, I caved into self-destruction. My bulimia amplified from throwing up obligatory family dinners to driving to grocery stores, Dollar Generals, and gas stations, shoving junk food into my purse in between security camera reach, devouring the calories in the corners of desolate parking lots, and scurrying into remote public restrooms in the outskirts of town. My knees would rest on the cold, sticky tile floors as I wrapped my arms around bleach-scented toilets as if embracing an old friend. ~ Maggie Georgiana Young

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Maybe espresso is one of those universal words because it's a little like life. You have to enjoy life slowly, savoring every single moment so you don't miss anything important. Like your brother's despair and your own self-destruction. Like surprise honeymoons and your kids growing up before your very eyes.
Slow down, pay attention, and drink it in. And don't forget to share it with the ones you love. ~ Cassia Leo

Man's exploitation of the environment is a circuitous route to unintended suicide. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

An unbalanced soul seeks equilibrium. I seek a constitutional form to gather my thoughts. I wish to form a flexible personality. I desire to be gentle and fluid of mind. I wish to summon hidden personal powers, but I lack the knowledge and wisdom to do so. I lack a cohesive unifying spirit. I have yet to claim the authenticity of my life. I failed to accept that what anyone else thinks of me would not stave off an inevitable death. I have not claimed a purpose for living. I have not found a basic truth that I can live and die supporting. I failed to exert the resolute will to become who I aspire to be. I rejected abstract concepts and failed to endorse the systematic reasoning of philosophical studies. I indulged in the type of obsessive excessive self-analysis, which leads to the brink of personal destruction through self-objectification and artificial triumphs. Echoing the words of Romanian philosopher and writer E.M. Cioran (1911-1995), 'I've invented nothing; I've simply been the secretary of my sensations. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are hurtling towards self-destruction at an alarming rate thanks chiefly to an advertising and propaganda system that goads people from infancy towards apathy, isolation, passivity, helplessness and separation. ~ Noam Chomsky

I've finally tapped into that spirit of self-destruction that makes rock-n-roll the king of music! ~ Homer

When you don't work together you can't emerge as a force. It becomes what some call a "lonely struggle" and individual self-destruction. ~ Haile Gerima

In one degree or another we all struggle with selfishness. Since it is so common, why worry about selfishness anyway? Because selfishness is really self-destruction in slow motion. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion. Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself--in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements. ~ Truman Capote

My default is self-destruction, and anything on top of that is a bloody lot of work. ~ Gillian Anderson

I think I'm going to skip all of my classes today because I need a "me" day. The problem with "me" days is that I need them four times a week. The problem with me is that I'm very smart and very capable (or so I've been told) but my laziness hinders me. Laziness. They forgot to add procrastination, self-destruction, and the inability to leave my bed to the list. The problem with me is that I've dealt with this before but have no idea what to do next. I should email my past teachers and ask them what I did after I sent them messages excusing my week-long absences from class due to "personal reasons." I should stop scratching my hand in case my mom asks me if I'm okay again. I am okay. I am doing fine. But I have an itch that I cannot place, an itch that changes locations when my fingers find it. The problem with me is that I will focus on it completely until it goes away. The problem with this feeling is that it never goes away. It has always been one large itch that I cannot place. ~ Lora Mathis

Beware of becoming a pawn in your own game. ~ Marty Rubin

Fear or happiness... Parenting or impulse... Primitive stupidity or vain self-destruction... ~ Plamen Chetelyazov

Escape into self-destruction by all means; but not until your duty is done. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

If there's a takeaway from working here, it's an understand that, as bioorganisms, we are a walking time bomb programed for cellular self-destruction. Not if, when. ~ Laurie Nadel

The brain is the only organ that tries to make sense of its pain. It is as if the bone were trying to understand the break, as if the blood vessel could comprehend its rupture. But this is also its greatest impediment to understanding. The mind clings fiercely to any alternative to chaos, even if that alternative is self-destruction. ~ Tracy Thompson

The cigarette represents a simple pleasure coupled with self-destruction and defiance of death. Melodrama ~ Benjamin Doolin

The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

Perhaps it was a tacit acknowledgement of her tendency to find danger, to gravitate towards self-destruction, but she'd been terrified of heights all her life. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

Nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction. ~ Suzanne La Follette

Yes, the laws of self-preservation and of self-destruction are equally powerful in this world. The devil will hold his empire over humanity until a limit of time which is still unknown. You laugh? You do not believe in the devil? Scepticism as to the devil is a French idea, and it is also a frivolous idea. Do you know who the devil is? Do you know his name? Although you don't know his name you make a mockery of his form, following the example of Voltaire. You sneer at his hoofs, at his tail, at his horns - all of them the produce of your imagination! In reality the devil is a great and terrible spirit, with neither hoofs, nor tail, nor horns; it is you who have endowed him with these attributes! But ... he is not the question just now! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When I awake, I suddenly understood this propensity for self-destruction was not an abomination, not something to be ashamed of or abhorred; it was our greatest strength. We turn the gun on ourselves not because we are more indifferent and less cultured...on the contrary. We are prepared to destroy that which we have created because we believe more than any of them in the power of the picture, the poem, the prayer, or the person. ~ Amor Towles

I had seen my becoming a vampire in two lights: The first light was simply enchantment ... But the other light was my wish for self-destruction. ~ Anne Rice

Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It's an undoing. ~ Leah Raeder

This, I feel, is the advantage to creating art at this point in time: When we realize that we are temporary, we are facing our self-destruction, we are realizing our fate and we must confront it. Art is the only sensible primal response to an outlook of possible destruction (obliteration). ~ Keith Haring

He was a man obsessed. He didn't think Columbia understood how obsessed he had become with her in such a short time. He supposed all signs pointed to it, and if the myriad of daytime talk shows he'd rotted his brain with from time to time were correct, he could be accused of being codependent or falling to fast.

But he was falling, he fell. He could feel her in his bones, his marrow, his blood…his cock. Every time he thought about how close he had come to killing her, he wanted to tear at his flesh and howl at his near self-destruction, for if she were gone from him now it would be an act against himself. ~ Jaden Wilkes

The world ain't ready for true black genius. In every nigger is a cup of African blood from kings and queens of divine nature, mathematicians, craftsmen, men and women of the land. I have known some sisters and brothers would scare Einstein back into East European caves with the magnificence of their minds. We are a people with a practical nature and great vision. We have built nations, discovered treasures for everyday use. Our people are a great race of people, and though the Europeans raped and plundered, we have kept inner riches. You got a cup of African blood and that mean something, means you got a responsibility to be proud of it and use your talents or suffer self-destruction. ~ Shay Youngblood

The most dangerous thing we can do with intelligence is to let it speak without being both chastised and informed by wisdom. For if we let it speak without the constraints and forbearance of wisdom, we will destroy ourselves. And in doing so, we will be so caught up in our 'intelligence' that we won't even realize that it's 'us' that's killing 'us. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

It was clearly the Native American curse on the white man in action. After taking their land and converting everything that was holy and good into money, the white man became aged and foolish and then gambled all that money away at Native American casinos. The power of this magic was indisputable and in evidence all around me. Senior citizens chain smoked and dumped money into the machines, staring with eyes that only reacted to the prospect of making a buck from risk and self-destruction. Especially if this were enhanced by the notion of a fate that had their interests in mind in a way loosely connected to their Christian God who usually took their side in racial relations, if history were to be a judge. ~ Carl-John X. Veraja

The instinct of self-preservation and the urge to self-destruction are equally strong in man! The Devil has equal a sway over humanity as God until a time still unknown to us. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I can't listen to you. I can't listen to your voice. It's as though I'd drunk a bottle of anise and fallen asleep wrapped in a quilt of roses. It pulls me along – and I know I'm drowning – but I go on down. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

After he and this girl split up in Paris, Roger was on the town; really on the town. He joked about it and made fun of himself; but he was very angry inside for having made such a profound fool of himself and he took his talent for being faithful to people, which was the best one he had, next to the ones for painting and writing and his various good human and animal traits, and beat and belaboured that talent miserably. He was no good to anyone when he was on the town, especially to himself, and he knew it and hated it and he took pleasure in pulling down the pillars of the temple. It was a very good and strongly built temple and when it is constructed inside yourself it is not so easy to pull down. But he did as good a job as he could. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

All parents want their offspring to be exemplars of virtue and achievement and happiness. But most of all, we want desperately for you to be safe - safe from disease and violence and self-destruction. ~ Estelle Ramey

Thou hast but enraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man. ~ Herman Melville

If you don't walk according to the Word of God, then you are on the way that leads to self-destruction ~ Sunday Adelaja

Entitlement is the shovel that digs a grave of greed. And there are those of us who stand at the bottom of such a grave having thrown out the last shovel full of dirt, never realizing that the grave that we've dug is our own until the same shovel suddenly starts backfilling the hole. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Abstaining from sex, hitting the books, and wearing loose-fitting clothes are common ways that girls try to molt their "slutty" image. But more often their shame leads them to self-destructive behavior. They become willing to do things that they wouldn't have dreamed of doing before they were scandalized because they now feel they have so little to offer. Some girls do drugs or drink to excess in an attempt to blot away their stigma. Others become depressed and anorexic. And others think so little of themselves that they date boys who insult or beat them. ~ Leora Tanenbaum

A God who knew the answer to that question would indeed know everything and have everything. For that reason he would be unmotivated to do anything or create anything. There would be no purpose to act in any way whatsoever. But a God who had one nagging question - what happens if I cease to exist? - might be motivated to find the answer in order to complete his knowledge ... The fact that we exist is proof that God is motivated to act in some way. And since only the challenge of self-destruction could interest an omnipotent God, it stands to reason that we ... are God's debris. ~ Scott Adams

The emphasis and the reason for a pure humility is to result in love for others; not always necessarily the belittlement of self. When there is pride and self-righteousness and being pretentiously too far above, generally, one has a difficult time reaching the compassionate side of love for others, the side that understands (or at least attempts to understand): 'I am aware that I am not so far from falling in the same way.' Humility seeks to understand, and sometimes even relate; and in result, the love lovingly, properly, effectively wills the removal of the destructive sins of another as from oneself. ~ Criss Jami

There is a widespread belief that americans hate cities. I think it is probable that Americans hate city failure, but, from the evidence, we certainly do not hate successful and vital city areas. On the contrary, so many people want to make use of such places, so many people want to work in them or live in them or visit in them, that municipal self-destruction ensues. In killing successful diversity combinations with money, we are employing perhaps our nearest equivalent to killing with kindness. ~ Jane Jacobs

My illness, I well knew, had been entirely brought on by myself by such negligence of my own health, as I had felt even at the time to be wrong. Had I died, it would have been self-destruction. ~ Jane Austen

I make an effort to survive my own self-destruction. ~ Kim Holden

Are you preparing for another war, Plutarch?" I ask.
"Oh, not now. Now we're in a sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated," he says. "But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss. ~ Suzanne Collins

Every breath, every moment, possessed with an illusion of glamor, of filthy decadence, purely because it was ours, we two our own radical world, a star collapsing inward and bursting, gorgeous, in the dark. ~ Katie Lowe

Trust is an illusion meant to wrap one in a false sense of belief, in that moment of realization will despair ultimately set in. ~ Lolah Runda

Rosenfeld went to work for the Herald Tribune after his graduation from Syracuse University and has always been an editor, never a reporter. He was inclined to worry that too many reporters on the metropolitan staff were incompetent, and thought even the best reporters could be saved from self-destruction only by the skills of an editor. His natural distrust of reporters was particularly acute on the Watergate story, where the risks were very great, and he was in the uncomfortable position of having to trust Bernstein and Woodward more than he had ever trusted any reporters.

-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward ~ Carl Bernstein

When we war against nature, we war against ourselves. There is no distinction, no dividing line, no enemy. We devour everything in a lust for self-destruction. As if that is intelligence's only gift. ~ Steven Erikson

A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy
so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving happiness of the recipients. ~ Ayn Rand

The largest culture shock was being Black in this atmosphere. We had white coaches, and they wanted the Black players to be the embodiment of who they were. They would tell us to wear our pants or shoes a certain way; this is what it meant to "be a man." They thought our path to manhood was to be found in skinny jeans and a tucked-in shirt. (Although now Migos, getting "Bad and Boujee," has all kinds of young players dressing like that by choice. Go figure.) But they never understood or tried to understand us. They projected their morals and thought processes onto young Black men without figuring out who we were. This struck me as a recipe for our continually being misunderstood, misguided, and misjudged, ingredients for disaster and rebellion, or at the very least for stress and self-destruction and the creation of the very PTSD that afflicts players when it's all over. ~ Michael Bennett

Don't underestimate the power of a guilty mind. Never underestimate self-shame and self-destruction. ~ Tim Hawken

The law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At this stage of the game, I don't have the time for patience and tolerance. Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have listened to people ask their questions, explained to them, mollified them. No more. That time is past. Now, as Norman Mailer said in Naked and the Dead, 'I hate everything which is not in myself.' If it doesn't have a direct bearing on what I'm advocating, if it doesn't augment or stimulate my life and thinking, I don't want to hear it. It has to add something to my life. There's no more time for explaining and being ecumenical anymore. No more time. That's a characteristic I share with the new generation of Satanists, which might best be termed, and has labeled itself in many ways, an 'Apocalypse culture.' Not that they believe in the biblical Apocalypse - the ultimate war between good and evil. Quite the contrary. But that there is an urgency, a need to get on with things and stop wailing and if it ends tomorrow, at least we'll know we've lived today. It's a 'fiddle while Rome burns' philosophy. It's the Satanic philosophy. If the generation born in the 50's grew up in the shadow of The Bomb and had to assimilate the possibility of imminent self destruction of the entire planet at any time, those born in the 60's have had to reconcile the inevitability of our own destruction, not through the bomb but through mindless, uncontrolled overpopulation. And somehow resolve in themselves, looking at what history has taught us, that no amount of yelling, prot ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence. ~ Ayn Rand

Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction. He sees that in this nuclear age vast new industrial complexes enable man to produce in one hour that which he labored over for years in the past, but he also realizes that these same industries have disturbed the ecological balance and, through air and noise pollution, have contaminated his own milieu ... ~ Henri Nouwen

Children of the future, watching empires fall. Madness the cup they drink from, self destruction the toll. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

With the more endowed nations constrained by their own higher technological capacity for self-destruction as well as by self interest, war may have become a luxury that only the poor peoples of this world can afford. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. ~ Lewis Henry Morgan

When the ego dominates in organizations, even spiritual organizations, there is usually a big drama or upheaval of some kind, and self-destruction begins. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Altruism eventuates in all realities, else self-destruction consumes it. ~ Guy Lozier

Idealistic notions that guide a younger person frequently prove unsustainable. Concluding any stage of life demands that a person rebuilds oneself after living destroys our ideological beliefs. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!"
" But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity ... ~ Kenzaburo Oe

A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction ~ Michael Chabon

The poor manufacture the engines of their own destruction, but it's the rich who sell them. ~ Sebastian Japrisot

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb. ~ Chris Hedges

The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall ~ Cormac McCarthy

Having a low opinion of yourself is not 'modesty.' It's self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not 'egotism.' It's a necessary precondition to happiness and success. ~ Bobbe Sommer

I would rather fight with my pain or end up with self destruction. ~ Venky Naidu

We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves. ~ James Thurber

The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Drug cartels have taken the driver's seat, training our young
men and women on how best to self destruct, while the larger
community watches on helplessly as these bands of renegades lead
our people towards the path of self annihilation ~ Oche Otorkpa

Fear ... the right and necessary counterweights to that courage which urges men skyward, and protects them from self-destruction ~ Heinrich Harrer

One thing's for sure, everyone has something. Not everyone has a giant scar or a missing limb to show for it, but it's there. The indelible mark of that thing. It's that thing that will not just go away quietly. That thing you resent because it can't let one day go by without making you think about it no matter how hard you try, until you end up depressed/angry/drunk/isolated (at best), disassociated (middle) or utterly self-destructive (at worst). It's that thing that went and branded you without your permission. ~ Anne Clendening

There are two types of fear:
There is a fear of something that is presently before you, be it a monster under your bed or a knife welding maniac pounding his fist through your door. It's a fear that you recognize as a fear that is approaching you at the very moment. It may not even be something drastic, it could very well be that the fear before you may be a confrontation with an enemy, a fear of heights or even a fear of tuna (trust me, it exists). Regardless, the fear is in your face and it's not going anywhere.

The second type of fear is a type of in which you do not see a reaction right away, or in some cases, ever. You make work on something your entire life and fear the outcome, but the outcome may only catch up with you years down the road. This fear seems to come in more forms than we mere mortals can comprehend. It is a fear of success, a fear of failure; a fear of unbelievable strength and power. It can crush you under its masculine hand and suck the life out of you because although it is not standing before you staring you right in the eye, it is mentally tormenting you to the point of self destruction. ~ Leigh Hershkovich

When do the defense measures of a paranoid country become their own agents of self-destruction? ~ Christopher Bollen

Each day contains the threat of failure and assaults by others, but it is the threat of self-destruction that we are most afraid to touch, except in our secret moments or the hidden recesses of our minds. ~ Edwin S. Shneidman

As I look at my life, I might ask "Who is the person that represents the greatest threat to me?" And if I happen to have a mirror around somewhere, I can rather quickly answer that question. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge - some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel. ~ Rita Mae Brown