#troy

The one effective method of defending one's own territory from an offensive by air is to destroy the enemy's air power with the greatest possible speed. ↗

— Giulio Douhet

#defending #destroy #effective #enemy #greatest

For a while, even in the house of good friends for dinner or for cocktails, they would really be upset. They thought I had single-handedly destroyed the best phone service in the world. ↗

— Harold H. Greene

#cocktails #destroyed #dinner #even #friends

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events. ↗

— Thomas Lynch

#context #create #death #destroy #disappear

War drags human beings from their tasks of building and improving, and pushes them en masse into the category of destroyers and killers. ↗

— Scott Nearing

#building #category #destroyers #drags #human

This also is a part of the Church's teaching, that the world was made and took its beginning at a certain time, and is to be destroyed on account of its wickedness. ↗

— Origen

#also #beginning #certain #certain time #church

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#destroyed #excesses #generation #great #ideals

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#does #makes #me #stronger

It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have. ↗

— Janet Fitch

#janet-fitch #white-oleander #nature

Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form. Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money. I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worst suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain-saw murder just before it happens, when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple are still connected. Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshipers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge to step on ants. I keep the beat, and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes, crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's been done already, and the killing, and the survivors wander around looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most. This, and the pretense that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals, obvious as a slam of ham, but I come from the province of the gods where meaning are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mothers was raped by a holy swan. You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands. There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. Not that anyone here but you would understand. The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery. Wall me up alive in my own body. They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look - my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#burned #counter #dancing #does #helen

But the queen--too long she has suffered the pain of love, hour by hour nursing the wound with her lifeblood, consumed by the fire buried in her heart. [...] His looks, his words, they pierce her heart and cling-- no peace, no rest for her body, love will give her none. ↗

— Virgil

#greek #myth #mythology #the-aeneid #trojan