Elias Canetti Quotes

It can't help but knock things down.

In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history.

Avoid the poison in your life that brings you turmoil.

Laughter is always fatal to feeling.

Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.

Anything that makes weak - physically, intellectually and spiritually, reject it as poison.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

I am mountains that crush. I am waves that crash. I am storms that shatter. I am the end.

We live in a world which respects power above all things. Power, intelligently directed, can lead to more freedom. Unwisely directed, it can be a dreadful, destructive force.

The worst drugs are as bad as anybody's told you. It's just a dumb trip, which I can't condemn people if they get into it, because one gets into it for one's own personal, social, emotional reasons. It's something to be avoided if one can help it.

Radiation, unlike smoking, drinking, and overeating, gives no pleasure, so the possible victims object.

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation.

Common sense should tell us that positively reinforcing sadistic behavior, as these games do, cannot be good for our children.

I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin.

For me, addiction comes down to basically where a pattern of behaviour has developed and that pattern of behaviour is becoming a very damaging cycle. It's sort of damaging your relationships, friends or lovers, it's damaging your own personal health and it's damaging for you and your workplace.

For me, anything I do is totally up for conversation and it's not my right to be able to stop a person from writing whatever they want. What's harmful and hurtful is when people speculate.

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

Deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac . . . it fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.

Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.

Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.

The poison by which the weaker nature is destroyed is strengthening to the strong individual and he does not call it poison.

I am disgusted with innovation, in whatever guise, and with reason, for I have seen very harmful effects of it.

Too much intensity can be a bad thing.