Brazil is strewn with ruins of projects – refineries, power plants – begun but never finished. Most of this investment never landed in places or industries that really meshed with the trajectory of the global economy. This wasn’t state-of-the art industrial policy. The projects seemed curiously nostalgic.
The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event – not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics – then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.
Complaining not only ruins everybody else’s day, it ruins the complainer’s day, too. The more we complain, the more unhappy we get.
We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.
Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.
Our works decay and disappear but God gentlest works stay looking down on the ruins we toil to rear.
Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.
Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it’s still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.
We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.
Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.
Jordan has a strange, haunting beauty and a sense of timelessness. Dotted with the ruins of empires once great, it is the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow. I love every inch of it.
The prudent person may direct a state, but it is the enthusiast who regenerates or ruins it.
Jewish and Palestinian nationalism are virtually contemporaneous, and grew out of the disruptions that created new national movements from the ruins of the old empires / i.
We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.
I hate meeting my favorite bands because then it just ruins it.
Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.
Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn’t set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.
Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.
I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don’t know what’s going to rise from the ruins.
Success produces confidence; confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins the reputation which accuracy had raised.
I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye – high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.
I have traveled a fair amount, and I have visited some great cities. I love architecture and museums and castles and ruins and central markets and even double-decker bus tours. But, I am a sucker for a tropical beach.
Sometimes it does me good to look back at the days when the living wasn’t so good. I remember in 1945 the dressing-rooms were gone, the park was in ruins, no stand, nothing.
Money messes up everything. It ruins art. The second you start putting price tags on this stuff, it’s… Art isn’t for just the wealthy. It’s for everybody to enjoy.
How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.
The best thing is to always keep honest people around, because when you have a bunch of yes men around that know that you’re making a mistake but let you go on with it, that’s when it ruins your mind state as an artist.
Men should never marry their muse. It ruins the illusion.
When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.
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