Vandalism Quotes

“Sorry I painted the word 'twat' on your garage door.”
― David Shrigley

“I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward's health had anything to do with this, and I don't say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him 'on his deathbed.' He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of 'Orientalism' in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward's revised edition, I decided I'd suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.

Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as 'racist.' The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice... I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that's 'it' as it were. I didn't say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. 'Racist' is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn't go to, and wasn't invited to, his funeral.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The police have no leads as yet on the person or persons who painted obscene suggestions on the buildings. One store owner said he was going to leave a dictionary on a public bench so the vandals could at least spell the obscenities correctly.”
― Anne Bishop, Marked in Flesh

“Who would vandalize a doghouse? I ask.
"Cats?" Bee suggests.”
― Paula Stokes, The Art of Lainey

“Si ritiene che il Colosso di Rodi sia crollato durante un terremoto. Questa non è tutta la verità. Il Colosso di Rodi rovinò per le frasi che i turisti, insieme ai loro nomi, vi incidevano alla base e che, nei secoli, aumentando sempre di numero e di volgarità, ne minarono la resistenza. Il terreno fece soltanto quel poco che restava da fare.”
― Ennio Flaiano, Diario notturno

“The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Historians will remember the first year of Microsoft Windows 10 for its willful vandalism of many computers through the release of a flawed operating system (OS) and mandatory flaky automatic updates.”
― Steven Magee

“I'll never understand any artist who agrees to be paid to create empty work or work for unnecessary appeasement. Art is always a statement. It should at the very least, be thought-provoking. To write an empty message is a disgusting vandalism.”
― Sasha Scarr

“Soon after the news broke about these published conclusions [regarding the evidence of a Palaeolithic human presence on Malta] and their stark contradiction of the orthodox view on Malta's prehistory, the Italian team distanced itself from its initial Palaeolithic leanings and claimed instead that the depictions in Ghar Hasan are 'out of context' -- which indeed they are if one is only prepared to countenance a Neolithic context for the earliest human presence in Malta.
Another development at about the same time was that the Ghar Hasan cave began to be vandalized, and the paintings defaced or completely removed, a process that continued over a long period. The result, which would have caused an international furore anywhere else but Malta, is that today:
'The only depictions which have survived, unless more are obscured by stalagmitic material on the cavern walls, are the two handprints in red pigment in Gallery D ... Vandalism not of the popular type has destroyed and obscured the entire repertoire of images on the accessible areas.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“The funds for all this had to be found from somewhere. Now, Constantine turned to ‘those accursed and foul people’ who had chosen to stubbornly ‘hold themselves back’ from Christianity and continue visiting their ‘sanctuaries of falsehood’ – in other words, those people who would soon be called ‘pagans’. The means by which Constantine chose to take some of this wealth was simple – and humiliating: he demanded that the statues be taken from the temples. Christian officials, so it was said, travelled the empire, ordering the priests of the old religion to bring their statues out of the temples. From the 330s onwards some of the most sacred objects in the empire started to be removed. It is hard, today, to understand the enormity of Constantine’s order. If Michelangelo’s Pietà were taken from the Vatican and sold, it would be considered a terrible act of cultural vandalism – but it wouldn’t be sacrilege as the statue is not in itself sacred. Statues in Roman temples were. To remove them was a gross violation, and Constantine knew it.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“By the time Theophilus attacked Serapis the laws were on his side. But many other Christians were so keen to attack the demonic temples that they didn’t wait for legal approval. Decades before the laws of the land permitted them to, zealous Christians began to indulge in acts of violent vandalism against their ‘pagan’ neighbours. The destruction in Syria was particularly savage. Syrian monks – fearless, rootless, fanatical – became infamous both for their intensity and for the violence with which they attacked temples, statues and monuments – and even, it was said, any priests who opposed them.
Libanius, the Greek orator from Antioch, was revolted by the destruction that he witnessed. ‘These people,’ he wrote, ‘hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues, and the overthrow of altars, and the priests must either keep quiet or die . . . So they sweep across the countryside like rivers in spate.’ Libanius spoke elegiacally of a huge temple on the frontier with Persia, a magnificent building with a beautiful ceiling, in whose cool shadows had stood numerous statues. Now, he said, ‘it is vanished and gone, to the grief of those who had seen it’ – and the grief of those who now never would. This temple had been so striking, he said, that there were even those who argued that it was as great as the temple of Serapis – which, he added with an irony not lost on later historians, ‘I pray may never suffer the same fate.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“The attacks were hymned by hagiographies and histories. In fourth-century France, St Martin, or so the Life of Martin proudly records, ‘set fire to a most ancient and famous shrine’ before moving on to a different village and a different temple. Here, he ‘completely demolished the temple belonging to the false religion and reduced all the altars and statues to dust’. Martin was no anomaly. Flushed by his success at the temple of Serapis, Bishop Theophilus went on to demolish numerous shrines in Egypt. Hagiography records such attacks not as dismal or even embarrassing acts of vandalism but as proof of a saint’s virtue. Some of the most famous saints in Western Christianity kicked off their careers – so the stories like to boast – demolishing shrines.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“My eyes suddenly caught a vandalized sign on a door in a tight corner near Thrasyllou Street, which seemed like an intelligent twist of Charles Bukowski’s famous line “find what you love and let it kill you.” The line on the vandalized sign reversed this to make the meaning even more intense: “find out what kills you and love it!”
― Louis Yako

“Thoughts at a Café Table
Between the Kazan and the Iron Gates

Progress has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater. A traveller sitting at my old table on the quay at Orsova would have to peer at the scenery through a thick brass-hinged disc of glass; this would frame a prospect of murk and slime [...] Moving a couple of miles downstream, he would fumble his way on to the waterlogged island and among the drowned Turkish houses; or, upstream, flounder among the weeds and rubble choking Count Széchenyi's road and peer across the dark gulf at the vestiges of Trajan on the other side; and all round him, above and below, the dark abyss would yawn and the narrows where currents once rushed and cataracts shuddered from bank to bank and echoes zigzagged along the vertiginous clefts would be sunk in diluvian since. [...]

He could toil many days up these cheerless soundings, for Rumania and Yugoslavia have built one of the world's biggest ferro-concrete dams and hydro-electric power plants across the Iron Gates. This has turned a hundred and thirty miles of the Danube into a vast pond which has swollen and blurred the course of the river beyond recognition. It has abolished cayons, turned beetling crags into mild hills and ascended the beautiful Cerna valley almost to the Baths of Hercules. Many thousands of the inhabitabnts of Orşova and the riparian hamlets had to be uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The islanders of Ada Kaleh have been moved to another islet downstream and their old home has vanished under the still surface as though it has never been. Let us hope that the power generated by the dam has spread well-being on either bank and lit up Rumanian and Yugoslav towns brighter than ever before because, in everything but economics, the damage is irreparrable.

[... M]yths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of shadow. Goethe's advice, 'Bewahre Dich vor Räuber und Ritter und Gespenstergeschichten',* has been taken literally, and everything has fled.

_____________

* Beware of the robber, the cavalier, and ghost stories.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water

“There is a sense of danger in these places too, and the evidence of vandalism, vagrancy, and drug abuse often heralds the reminder that you are at risk. Indeed, danger can be attractive as well.”
― Mike Correll, Abandoned Sulphur, Louisiana

“Corporate vandalism of Space is well underway.”
― Steven Magee

“In South Africa when comrades are hungry they break, vandalize and destroy everything. When citizens or communities are angry they break, vandalize and destroy everything.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“Vandalism Ain't Activism (The Sonnet)

Systemic change is a slow and tedious process,
It doesn't happen overnight by vandalizing society.
If vandalism and activism were one and the same,
Our jungly ancestors would've been the ideal humanity.
Change habits, change yourself, submit to no primitivity,
The change that you dream of, be the epitome of that change.
Obstructing traffic and refusing to let an ambulance pass,
You're not fighting any crisis, but being a crisis yourself.
Go fly a kite, it is good for the mind as well as body,
Get lessons on common sense before appointing yourself king.
The line between activism and terrorism is so thin that,
Often many go astray without having the slightest inkling.
I repeat, systemic change is a slow and tedious process.
The more you rush with recklessness, the more you digress.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Vandalism ain't activism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Systemic change is a slow and tedious process,
It doesn't happen overnight by vandalizing society.
If vandalism and activism were one and the same,
Our jungly ancestors would've been the ideal humanity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“In the second book of his great autobiographical word, Confessions, Augustine fretted at length over a childish act of vandalism that he committed long ago with some teenage friends; he was now struggling to understand the motive behind an action that seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. He concluded that he broke the law for no other reason than the thrill of breaking it, experiencing a rush he calls a 'deceptive sense of omnipotence.'

By this phrase he meant that such gratuitous lawbreaking provides the illusion of being as free from the restraints of the moral law as is God, who must be imagined as both creating the moral law and existing outside it. But Augustine went on to say that this attempt to be a god is really only a 'perverse and vicious imitation' of the real deity, not only because it’s so obviously an illusion but also because the very attempt to be like God tacitly concedes that God is a superior model to be imitated.”
― Brian McDonald

“Vandalism isn't activism, you morons! If you want to help the climate, help the green energy industry become mainstream.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“Climate Activists (not all) have turned into Climate Karens, which has done nothing for the climate crisis, but has only added one more crisis to the list. BLM activists don't go about abusing white people, Pride activists don't go about harassing straight people, and yet, that's precisely what has become the norm in climate protests. Vandalism isn't activism, you morons! If you want to help the climate, help the green energy industry become mainstream.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“Climate Activists have turned into Climate Karens, which has done nothing for the climate crisis, but has only added one more crisis to the list.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“What a word, Will! Vandalized! Did you just make that up?"

"It was you who spoke of Vandals, sir."

"Yes, I did! An excellent word.”
― Justin Scott, The Sister Queens