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Destructiveness   Listen
noun
Destructiveness  n.  
1.
The quality of destroying or ruining.
2.
(Phren.) The faculty supposed to impel to the commission of acts of destruction; propensity to destroy.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Destructiveness" Quotes from Famous Books



... of things white men are hardly worth more than black ones. For, not only is the band, whose aim is violence, composed of those who are most destitute, most wildly enthusiastic, and most inclined to destructiveness and to license. But also, as this band tumultuously carries out its violent action, each individual the most brutal, the most irrational, and most corrupt, descends lower than himself, even to the darkness, the madness, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... the brain itself, is plainly absurd. Pressed by this, Spurzheim has, at length, been guilty of some sheer quackery; and ventures to say that he has actually discovered a different material in the different parts or organs of the brain, so that he can tell a piece of benevolence from a bit of destructiveness, and so forth. Observe, also, that it is constantly found, that so far from there being a concavity in the interior surface of the cranium answering to the convexity apparent on the exterior—the interior ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... indirectly connected with the subject of our work, it seems desirable to make some mention of it here, at least so far as relates to those terrible convulsions whose destructiveness has given them special prominence in the history of great disasters. Ancient notable examples are those which threw down the famous Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos of Alexandria. The city of Antioch was a terrible sufferer from this affliction, it having been devastated ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... I guess you will find seven bullets in the blazed stump. I will, however, stick seven playing cards on the stump, in different places, and, if you choose, hit them all.' After sundry but unaccepted offers to his English brother-militant for a trial of mutual destructiveness, he made his offer to the British government through its representative, but which that loyal subject, in a fit of mortification, declined to convey, on the ground that if he 'made the finest offer in the world to the British government, they would only sneer' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various

... who will trust their skins, and their eyes, and their clothes to 'Vesuvians,' 'Flamers,' and the like, are not to be pitied; for they are more cruel to their tobacco than the fusees are to them. Our grievance is that so many engines of destructiveness and offensiveness should be so largely patronized by smokers, to their own discomfort, the ruination of their tobacco, the scandalization of gentle and simple, and the encouragement of vicious manufactures. Now, we are not going to ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... common. They do not—like the English ones—run scared away at the sight of a human being—not a bit of it; Australian ants have more PLUCK, and will turn and face you. Nay, more, should you RETREAT, they will run after you with all the impudence imaginable. Often when my organ of destructiveness has tempted me slightly to disturb with the end of my parasol one of the many ant-hills on the way from Melbourne to Richmond, I have been obliged, as soon as they discovered the perpetrator of the attack, to take to my heels and run away ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey

... most destructive of those which have corrupted and infected public life in the country. These two—the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Irish Republican Brotherhood—have in common the secrecy of their operations and the destructiveness of their aims. Their influence is marked not only by despotic and tyrannical government, but, what may be even more mischievous from the point of view of the community, by the deliberate persecution and suppression of all independent thought. Those who have watched the proceedings of ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... 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 ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... years 1500 and 1800.—Since A.D. 1500 there have been fifty-six recorded eruptions of Vesuvius; one of these in 1767 was of terrific violence and destructiveness, and is represented by Sir William Hamilton in views taken both before and during the eruption. A pen-and-ink drawing of the appearance of the crater before the eruption is here reproduced from Hamilton's ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull

... startling. He told Mary of the evil results which had followed some of his blows, and Mary's incredulity was only heightened by a display of the young man's muscles. She extolled these because she thought it was her duty to do so, but preserved some doubts of their unique destructiveness. Once she asked him could he fight a policeman, and he assured her that policemen are not able to fight at all singly, but only in squads, when their warfare is callous and ugly and conducted mainly with their boots; so that ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... altogether the sportsman's organ of destructiveness (for he had never forgotten little Jay's lesson on that head), but probably a growing dislike to the constant diet of pork, that urged him to an unrelenting pursuit. Cautiously he crept through the thickets, having wafted an unavailing ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... found the organ of destructiveness in strong development, just then, upon Edward's cranium; for he certainly manifested an impulse to break and destroy whatever chanced to be within his reach. He commenced his operations by upsetting ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... all the universe, and with man as a small part of it. He understood human institutions, and blew them about like soap bubbles. It was surprising that so much destructiveness could be contained in one human mind. Was it government? The purpose of government was the guarding of property-rights, the perpetuation of ancient force and modern fraud. Or was it marriage? Marriage and prostitution were ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... Cambridge, Mr. 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 ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... who strode up and down roaring commands and encouragement, suddenly cast away his regal role and, seizing a club from one of his bodyguard, hurled himself on the nearest Red Bones—a raving, ravening demon of destructiveness whose glaring eyes smote terror into those fronting him and whose weapon swung like the club of Hercules. His bowmen and blowgun men, at last out of missiles, came charging in with bare hands or weapons seized from fallen warriors. Maneuvering had ended. Henceforth ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel

... 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 on these young fellows' hats, and ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott

... these were battles, bombardments, stratagems to save our scalps from the red Indians. You have no imagination, Ann. I am ten times more destructive now than I was then. The moral passion has taken my destructiveness in hand and directed it to moral ends. I have become a reformer, and, like all reformers, an iconoclast. I no longer break cucumber frames and burn gorse bushes: I shatter ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... party. Indeed, Lucy's interest in science was so great that she unwittingly pulled two or three extremely rare specimens to pieces while listening to these eloquent discourses, and was only made conscious of her wickedness by a laughing remark from Hector that she "must surely have the bump of destructiveness largely developed." ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne

... the primal ground of inferiority in these pleasures is that which proves their indulgence to be contrary to reason; namely their destructiveness upon prolongation, and their incapability of co-existing continually with other delights or ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... wrongly Conflation for the reverse process? That in the earliest ages, when the Church did not include in her ranks so much learning as it has possessed ever since, the wear and tear of time, aided by unfaith and carelessness, made itself felt in many an instance of destructiveness which involved a temporary chipping of the Sacred Text all through the Holy Gospels? And, in fact, that Conflation at least as an extensive process, if not altogether, did ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... doubted the atomicbomb would do the trick, finally and conclusively. The searing, volcanic heat, irresistible penetration, efficient destructiveness and the aftermath of apocalyptic radiation promised ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... 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

... our Watch Dog correspondent, recent movements show that the lawless German "has attained little by his destructiveness save the discomfort of H.Q. Otherwise the War progresses as merrily as ever; more merrily, perhaps, owing to the difficulties to be overcome. Soldiers love difficulties to overcome. That is their business in life." This is the way that young officers write "in the brief interludes snatched from ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... of fact, it was not queer. Johnny Calvert had dilated on the destructiveness of rats, "pack rats" he called them. They would chew paper all to bits, he said. So Helen May, being finicky about having her papers chewed, had brought along this mouse-proof desk with her ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower

... smooth down the rough creation which Nature flung to it. He forges the mighty anchor and every lesser instrument; he drives the steamboat and drags the rail-car; and it was he—this creature of terrible might, and so many-sided utility and all-comprehensive destructiveness—that used to be the cheerful, homely friend of our wintry days, and whom we have made the ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the outside of the earliest meeting-houses bear,—grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear, which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough. The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September, twenty ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... They were stationed at Walcheren, which was the principal seat of the sickness and suffering of their predecessors, sixty or seventy years before. Fever and dysentery attacked this second army as they had the first, and with a similar virulence and destructiveness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... to shatter the lock, whereupon my choler rose to heights hitherto unknown, I being a very mild-mannered, placid person and averse to anything savouring of the tempestuous. I delivered a savage and resounding thwack upon the broad oak panel of the door, regardless of the destructiveness that might attend the effort. If any one had told me that I couldn't splinter an oak board with a sledge-hammer at a single blow I should have laughed in his face. But as it turned out in this case I not only failed to split the panel but broke off the sledge handle near the ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... that confronts us is: How can we save and strengthen the fine qualities which this spontaneous association with other boys produces without encouraging the lawlessness and the destructiveness and the secretiveness of the gang? First of all, we mothers must recognize not only that the boy cannot be happy without his associates, but also that the social virtues will never be developed in him at all if we keep him at home away from the others or restricted to one or ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... with the distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of rottenness ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... 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

... succeed in proposing the question of separate responsibility so as to convince every civilised mind of his doubts, there will be curiously little change wrought thereby in the discipline of the world. For Dr. Holmes incidentally lets us know that he cherishes and values the instinct of intolerance and destructiveness in presence of the cruel, the self-loving, and the false. Negation of separate moral responsibility, when that negation is tempered by a working instinct of intolerance and destructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in the manner achieved by the ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell

... 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

... I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of them could be forced somehow ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... side there is a tacit understanding not to disregard each other's personal comfort and welfare must now modify their views. Recent movements show that there is no such bargain, or else that the lawless Hun has broken it. He has attained little else by his destructiveness save the discomfort of H.Q. Otherwise the War progresses as merrily as ever; more merrily, perhaps, owing to the difficulties to be overcome. Soldiers love difficulties to overcome. That is their business ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various

... nevertheless, to make a last attempt to avert the horrid prospect of a war which, from the malignant hatred exhibited by all classes of Roman Catholics, he rightly judged would exceed the previous contests both in duration and in destructiveness. He addressed to his young sovereign a letter explaining the necessity of the step he was about to take, accompanied by a long appeal, of which it would be impracticable to give even a brief summary. Every point in the multitudinous grievances ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... acquainted with Mainwaring, Lucretia felt the shock of a grief sudden and sincere. We have seen how these better sentiments changed as human life became an obstacle in her way. In her character, what phrenologists call "destructiveness," in the comprehensive sense of the word, was superlatively developed. She had not actual cruelty; she was not bloodthirsty: those vices belong to a different cast of character. She was rather deliberately and intellectually unsparing. A goal was before her; she must march ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... lonely and afraid. She had too many rivals. There were young girls in myriads, beauties by the drove, sirens in herds, millionaires in packs. The country was so prosperous with the privilege of selling Europe the weapons of suicide that the vast destructiveness of the German submarines was ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... of prey,” so called, the greatest part are extinct, or nearly so, too often from a mistaken belief in their destructiveness; whereas they are really useful allies of the farmer, if not also of the sportsman. In the cause of the latter, they, for the most part destroy (if they destroy game at all) the weakly members, so conducing towards keeping up a vigorous breed, and for the farmer they destroy smaller ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... Seldom has the frightful destructiveness of war been more strikingly illustrated. The commerce of the United States was completely crippled by the blockade of her ports, her revenue falling from $24,000,000 to $8,000,000. Admiral Cockburn, of the British Navy, swept the Atlantic coast with his fleet, destroying arsenals and naval stores ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... administration; and although from the time of Pompey to that of Louis XIV it has had an ineradicable tendency to stand against the government, it has survived the results of all its contumacies, its plagues, wars, and sieges, and the destructiveness of its phase of the Revolution, when it had a Terror of its own. Notwithstanding modern rivals in the Mediterranean, Marseilles is to-day one of the largest and most prosperous of French cities. Built in amphitheatre around the bay, it is beautiful in general ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose

... had never existed, or crushed to death by fragments of falling buildings. In six minutes, by the great earthquake of Lisbon, in 1755, sixty thousand souls were launched into eternity; and though none in this city have equalled in destructiveness the great one at Lisbon, yet Guatemala has been several times nearly destroyed by earthquakes, combined with the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... protection from freight fractors and baggage smashers. The European appeals to knowledge. The American addresses the imagination. The one expresses the truth. The other extends it. Neither is entirely successful. The skill and care of shippers cannot always victoriously cope with the innate destructiveness of fallen human nature. There is a great deal of smashed crockery ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... to-night and bear testimony against slavery. I have seen it! I have seen it! I know it has horrors that can never be described. I was brought up under its wing. I witnessed for many years its demoralizing influences and its destructiveness to human happiness. I have never seen a happy slave. I have seen him dance in his chains, it is true, but he was not happy. There is a wide difference between happiness and mirth. Man can not enjoy happiness while his manhood is destroyed. Slaves, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... 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 ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... 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 in its repeated visitations. Its ravages ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... must admit that both you and the rat are increasing in numbers, and, therefore, in destructiveness. What is to ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... has, for reasons difficult to justify, so widely deviated from the old school which was so fruitful in brilliant results,—that of Pistocchi, Porpora, and Bernacchi. What could show more clearly the destructiveness of our present opera style than the sublime beauty of their singing, combined with their noble, refined, sound voices, such as may perhaps still be ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck

... not go beyond their strength, and since they see with their own eyes the results of their labor, a sense of responsibility is engendered which has a beneficial influence upon school work also. Respect for all kinds of labor and a decrease in the destructiveness so often found among boys are unmistakable effects of the arbor gardens. It is not easy work which the children perform, for spade and rake require muscular effort; but it is ennobling work, for it leads to self-respect, self-dependence, ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... hideousness protects them from exposure. During a decade and a half, while Mahdism controlled the country, there flourished a tyranny which for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even imagine. The keystones of the Mahdist party were religious intolerance and slavery, with murder and the most abominable cruelty as the ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... think de best thing would be for de people to be on dey knees en prayin. De people talkin bout fightin all de time en dis here talk bout fightin in de air, dat what got my goat. Might lay down at night sound en wake up in de mornin en find us all in destructiveness. I say, de Lord all what ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... bar with savage destructiveness, jerking up a tent-peg with each brawny hand, and as the old man cowered he dragged the tent forward until it threatened every moment to ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge

... 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 ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... I found out later, about four dollars; and I confess I found a peculiar satisfaction in the destruction of property belonging to a State which had deprived me of all my effects except underclothes. But my destructiveness was due to a variety of causes. It was occasioned primarily by a "pressure of activity," for which the tearing of druggets served as a vent. I was in a state of mind aptly described in a letter written during my first month of elation, in which I said, ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... 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 ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... in a conspiracy, because the position is false—" Her reasoning suspended itself a little inconclusively, for the subject was complex, and she found herself in ignorance whether Denham had a family or not. Denham was agreed with her as to the destructiveness of the family system, but he did not wish to discuss the problem ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... was to come when I should 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 ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... I heard of another boy who exercised the same kind of cruelty and destructiveness over another common a few miles distant. Walking across it I spied two boys among the furze bushes, and at the same moment they saw me, whereupon one ran away and the other remained standing. A nice little fellow of about eight, he looked as if he had ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... were mostly exempt from the actual slaughter, but their country had already been left by the enemy in about as bad a state as it could; for if it had been infested with swarms of locusts, the devastation could not have been paralleled. The war could not have left one family quite untouched by its destructiveness or by misery and grief irrecoverable for many years; and indeed, in some cases, for ever, for many a child was deprived of its father or mother, or even of both parents, and many were the parents who had lost their children; and if any had ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence

... 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 ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... to glance at the straiter religionists, and from which it has been inferred that he drew away from them as he grew older. It is very likely that years and widened experience of men may have produced in him their natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more generous side of Puritanism I think he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of clerical worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in "Mother Hubberd's Tale," published in 1591.[291] There is an iconoclastic ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... lungs, are accessory conditions. We do not associate corpulence or surplus of vitality with a long, slender neck. The character of cerebral manifestations is represented by the baser faculties of mind, such as Combativeness, Destructiveness, Desperation, Turbulence, Hatred, and Revenge. If unrestrained, these culminate in violent and criminal acts; if regulated, they are employed in personal defense. When unduly excited, they lead to dissipation, obscenity, swearing, rowdyism, and licentiousness; when perverted, they are ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... I have little faith," Fischer observed, "in any new explosives. In Germany they believe, I understand, that the limit of destructiveness has ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... see how terrible must have been its character, when this strong and lasting impression was left on the memory of Bracciolini, that he avails himself of it in this passage of the Annals to serve as a symbol of the worst species of destructiveness, from which we needs must gather that nothing could have broken out so unexpectedly and without apparent cause as the plague in England in 1422, nor have been more frightful and more rapid ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... baskets, we advanced about three miles along the beach—still with the slugs of the enemy whistling in our ears—and gave to the devouring element another town. Man is perhaps never happier than when his native destructiveness can be freely exercised, and with the benevolent complacency of performing a good action, instead of the remorse of perpetrating a bad one. It unites the charms of sin and virtue. Thus, in all probability, ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... cholera, which is eminently acute, might by some be considered as an exception. In negative diseases, there is a low degree of electro-vitality. And it has been remarked by careful observers, particularly in the Orient, that cholera rages with greatest destructiveness when no special electric phenomena have for long time appeared in the atmosphere, and when the artificial electrical apparatus could be made to yield its sparks only with difficulty, or not at all. And again, after a thunderstorm, ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark

... probably clear of any actual mischief. I strongly suspect that the spirit of destructiveness with many people is altogether too active. There are some farmers, with this principle predominant, so short-sighted, that if it was in their power they would destroy a whole class of birds, because some of them ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby

... could lavish, whatever there was of human energy which was panting for pacific utterance, wherever there stirred the vital principle which instinctively strove to create and to adorn at an epoch when vulgar violence and destructiveness were the general tendencies of humanity, all gathered around these magnificent temples, as their aspiring pinnacles at last pierced the mist which had so long brooded over ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... framed the Government under which we live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge of destructiveness against us, are based on the ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln

... interposed; desolate, grass-clad prairies, barren oceans of rolling plains, arid deserts, and a fierce race of savages, all had to be met and defeated. The rifle and the ax are the symbols of the backwoods pioneer. They meant a training in aggressive courage, in domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness. ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... Marsh, Mr., on destructiveness to vegetation of goats and camels, 17 Professor O., on the development of the horse tribe, 386 on brain development of Tertiary mammals, 391 on specialised forms dying ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... continued the cleaning of sand from the rifle in his hands. The rifle was useless against such a monster, of course, but it is quaint to reflect that in that automatic rifle, firing hexynitrate bullets, each equivalent to a six-pounder T.N.T. shell in destructiveness, Sergeant Walpole carried greater "fire-power" than ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster

... reply I vouchsafed was, that what he procured I would cook. In this way I forced him to pay out the money in his possession, at the expense of my character as a good wife, and a polite one. He took his revenge in abusive language, and occasional fits of destructiveness in the kitchen, which alarmed my little German neighbor more than it did me. So long as he secured all my earnings, and deceived people thoroughly as to his real conduct, he maintained, before others at least, a gentlemanly demeanor. ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... lake, at last to crash there; to send the ten-foot thicknesses of ice splintering like broken glass; to pyramid, to spray the whole nether world with ice and snow and scattering rock; then to settle, a jumbled conglomerate mass of destructiveness, ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... look back through history, and as we look abroad through our land and through all civilized lands, one of the most conspicuous facts concerning the powers of sex is their frightful destructiveness. The spectacle of wasted manhood and womanhood, of depleted powers in body, mind, and soul, is in history and in present society appalling. It is so oppressive that it has driven many thoughtful men and women to despair. Men otherwise hopeful and purposeful here become gloomy and ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various

... whose nature was of a much gentler cast, the vehemence is evidently more in the words than in the feeling, the tone of indignation is theatrical and assumed, and the brightness of the flash seems to be more considered than the destructiveness of the fire:— ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... I am a licentiate of the Royal College; but, unfortunately for me, my humanity is an overmatch for my science. Phrenologically speaking, my benevolence is large, and my destructiveness and acquisitiveness small." ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover



Words linked to "Destructiveness" :   poison, injuriousness, destructive, harmfulness



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