“There were always people searching for the Unmaker, for some awful destructive power outside themselves. Poor fools, they always thought that Destruction was merely destruction, they were using it and when they were done with it, they’d set to building. But you don’t build on a foundation of destruction. That’s the dark secret of the Unmaker, Alvin thought. Once he sets you to tearing down, it’s hard to get back to building, hard to get your own self back. The digger wears out the ground and the spade. And once you let yourself be a tool in the Unmaker’s hand, he’ll wear you out, he’ll tear you down, he’ll dull you and hole you and all the time you’ll be thining you’re so sharp and fine and bright and whole, and you never go till he lets go of you, lets you drop and fall. What’s that clatter? Why, that was me. That was me, sounding like a wore-out tool. What you leaving me for? I still got use left in me?
But you don’t, not when the Unmaker’s got you.”

The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)

From "In Defense of Self-defense" I (June 20, 1967)
To Die For The People
Context: The blood, sweat, tears, and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind.

Source: The Infernals

"Peace as a Civil Right" from A Prayer for America (2003) [Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-510-2], p. 76

Arundhati Roy commenting on the Godhra train attack The God of false things : How Arundhati Roy creates fake news and gets away with it https://www.opindia.com/2017/05/the-god-of-false-things-how-arundhati-roy-creates-fake-news-and-gets-away-with-it/ also https://www.opindia.com/2019/04/urban-naxals-congress-hacks-and-eminent-historians-what-media-wont-tell-you-about-writers-who-signed-the-anti-modi-statement/ (Her statement was criticized as being counter-factual.)

Von Bertalanffy (1949) "Problems of Organic Growth". In: Nature, Vol. 163. p. 156
1940s

"Notes about Music" (29 March 1946) http://web.archive.org/19991001055247/www.geocities.com/Nashville/3448/music.html also quoted in A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (2000) by Bryan K. Garman, p. 244
Context: I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.
And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.

The Forerunner (1920)
Context: You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation.
And I too am my own forerunner, for the long shadow stretching before me at sunrise shall gather under my feet at the noon hour. Yet another sunrise shall lay another shadow before me, and that also shall be gathered at another noon.
Always have we been our own forerunners, and always shall we be. And all that we have gathered and shall gather shall be but seeds for fields yet unploughed. We are the fields and the ploughmen, the gatherers and the gathered.