How to Use self-destruction in a Sentence
self-destruction
noun-
Who could fail to be entertained by such a saga of self-destruction?
—Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 5 Oct. 2023
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In Season 2, the show is richer and pricklier, keyed in to the nuances of self-destruction.
—Margaret Lyons, New York Times, 20 Apr. 2023
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In that attempt, the Starship failed, as did SpaceX’s self-destruction system.
—William Gavin, Quartz, 14 Mar. 2024
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To move away from feedback loops of self-destruction and violence.
—David Lipset, Los Angeles Times, 12 Jan. 2024
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The singer combines the genre’s enduring themes of heartbreak and self-destruction with camp humor and a distinctly Irish sense of the absurd.
—Roisin Kiberd, New York Times, 12 Oct. 2023
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There should be a sense of wounding loss in the disintegration — the self-destruction, even — of their small, frail family.
—Guy Lodge, Variety, 17 May 2024
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To turn your back on the sun and worm your way into ever colder and darker places seems like a deliberate act of self-destruction.
—Chris Wheatley, Longreads, 16 Mar. 2023
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One of those benefits, strangely enough, seems to be programmed self-destruction.
—Quanta Magazine, 6 Mar. 2024
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This anti-art horror film appeals to the hipster appetite for self-destruction.
—Armond White, National Review, 17 Nov. 2023
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Sylvia Plath narrates her self-destruction Hughes doesn’t wonder.
—Nora Krug, Washington Post, 6 June 2023
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There is a perverse tendency, in such situations, to treat the artist’s act of self-destruction as somehow a final artistic flourish.
—Chris Wiley, The New Yorker, 16 Apr. 2024
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Her daughter is described in stark extremes: a once-cherubic infant who’s now a churlish adolescent bent on self-destruction.
—Naomi Huffman, The Atlantic, 22 Jan. 2024
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There wasn’t much for Sibley to object to, beyond Giuliani’s general self-destruction.
—Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, 16 Dec. 2023
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The purpose of this appendage was simple: to accelerate the satellite’s self-destruction by pushing it into the Earth’s atmosphere.
—Jason Thomson, The Christian Science Monitor, 5 Apr. 2023
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The self always related persons to its own identity: self-regard, self-destruction, self-love.
—Olga Tokarczuk, Harper's Magazine, 6 Jan. 2023
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Like a lot of his clients, the chef, Cliff Grubin, used to be a hedonist but has since swapped self-destruction for self-care, specializing first in juicing and eventually branching out into raw food.
—Hadley Freeman, Travel + Leisure, 20 June 2023
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Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.
—Jen Juneau, Peoplemag, 6 May 2024
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Ballads of death and self-destruction suffused with strength and determination.
—Jeff Weiss, Spin, 21 Aug. 2023
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Her self-destruction was almost necessary because her old mechanisms for coping no longer served her.
—Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 10 May 2023
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Humanity failed miserably to defend itself against the plague of self-destruction.
—Elsa Keslassy, Variety, 2 Nov. 2023
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The address is striking now for its suggestion that Ukrainian independence would be an act of self-destruction, however.
—Jordan Michael Smith, The New Republic, 2 June 2023
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Vain, often drunk, desperate to get a leg up, the title character weaves in and out of humiliating scenarios, scraping by with a sense of self-inflation to match his appetite for self-destruction.
—Matt Brennan, Los Angeles Times, 8 Apr. 2024
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Re-platforming Jones will surely be seen in the corporate world as another sign of impulsive, reckless management and an appetite for self-destruction.
—Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 10 Dec. 2023
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Humans could be wiped out by a catastrophic asteroid strike, commit self-destruction with worldwide nuclear war or succumb to the ravages caused by the climate emergency.
—Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, 21 Mar. 2023
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Earth Day is now a global event, recognized by more than a billion people worldwide as a day to support positive environmental action that protects us from what some see as self-destruction.
—Terry Baddoo, USA TODAY, 21 Apr. 2023
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Pop stars being badasses, as ever, but expressing doubt, and doing it without the flagellating self-destruction that might have come with an early iteration.
—Susannah Felts, Longreads, 27 Apr. 2023
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The mental darkness attacking DEI leads, ultimately, to self-destruction.
—Wonder Drake, Baltimore Sun, 28 Apr. 2024
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Tommy documents Franklin's lows as spectacularly as her highs, from family conflicts to career burnout, self-destruction, and battles with addiction.
—Wired Staff, WIRED, 31 Mar. 2023
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In the seven years since her debut album, SZA’s ability to wrangle self-destruction in her songwriting has grown to darker, pettier heights—even better, she’s decided to outright reject the idea that maturity is a prerequisite for growth.
—Pitchfork, 12 Dec. 2023
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Across its four previous episodes, the show has examined its protagonists’ confusion, self-destruction, and despair, creating an intimate portrait of how geographic rootlessness can yield paralyzing melancholy.
—Shirley Li, The Atlantic, 16 Feb. 2024
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'self-destruction.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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