A Quote by Saul Bellow

De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.

Saul Bellow

Quote Topics

Being Considered Democratic Democratic Society Destructive Destructive Power Impulse Impulses Powers Same Society Strongest Toward Underestimating Well Well-Being

Quote Author

Saul Bellow
American - Writer
June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005

The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.

L. Ron Hubbard

It is a mistake - as so many over-centralized socialist societies have discovered - to try to eliminate money as an incentive. Money is one incentive among many, and has its place. But to put no limits on the impulse to accumulate money obsessively is as destructive as to place no limits on the impulse to commit violence. A viable democratic society needs a ceiling and a floor with regard to the distribution of wealth and assets.

Philip Slater

Nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. In them the two impulses that have long been treated as distinct, 'masculine' and 'feminine,' the impulse of self-assertion and the impulse of sympathy, are clearly joined; the very genius of nonviolence, in fact, is that it demonstrates them to be indivisible, and so restores human community.

Barbara Deming

It's not that bullying is any worse today. The impulse for cruelty is the same impulse. The only difference is that the tools to achieve that have become more sophisticated.

Jodee Blanco

Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this: always obey such an impulse.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

I love the abandonment to impulse, I act from impulse only, and I love to madness that others do the same by me.

Jeanne Julie Eleonore de Lespinasse

The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.

August Wilson

A living creature develops a destructive impulse when it wants to destroy a source of danger... The original motive is not pleasure in destruction... I destroy in a dangerous situation because I want to live and do not want to have any anxiety. In short, the impulse to destroy serves a primary biological will to live.

Wilhelm Reich

The subconscious mind will translate into its physical equivalent a thought impulse of a negative or destructive nature, just as readily as it will act upon thought impulses of a positive or constructive nature. This accounts for the strange phenomenon which so many millions of people experience, referred to as "misfortune" or "bad luck."

Napoleon Hill

There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.

Garet Garrett

I've always had this impulse to be destructive.

Russell Brand

I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.

William Gibson

The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.

Theodore Dreiser

Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.