Elizabeth I Quotes

I have always been interested in the concept of ruin.

Dictators cause the world's worst problems: all the collapsed states, and all the devastated economies. All the vapid cases of corruption, grand theft, and naked plunder of the treasury are caused by dictators, leaving in their wake trails of wanton destruction, horrendous carnage and human debris.

Haiti looks like a bomb hit it.

All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.

If it's going to be wrecked, I want to make sure I wreck it.

Atlanta is totally destroyed. I don’t think that people will live there any more.

In his anger William ordered that all crops and herds... and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes, so that the whole region north of Humber might be stripped of all means of survival.

... the fires of neglect.

Guerrilla parties are making dreadful slaughter upon the Union men in Missouri and stealing and destroying their property... The entire route across the State... bears the marks of the ravages of war... Anarchy reigns in Missouri.

It is useless to live on burned ruins.

Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.

If a building has been condemned or it's left to ruin, I get so upset. I feel something really deeply about it. I don't like to see anything neglected.

...they came to see what happened to their town, to see if it was indeed lying burnt and bleeding. Many of them also came to die.

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.

With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded.

Nothing to build, and all things to destroy.

Clearly, I see it. I was just about to leave when I found her kneeling there. A mountain range of rubble was written, designed, erected around her. She was clucthing at a book.

What cities, as great as this, have... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.

No it isn't very pretty, what a town without pity can do.

Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fire-place in the room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke; but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burnt wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all was dark and gloomy.

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.

Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.