Best 97 quotes in «catastrophe quotes» category

Oral tradition accounts that the author was able to glean from living local experts are that the Spanish, upon first seeing the great wall of Sacsayhuaman in 1533, and shocked at its scale, asked the local Inca if their ancestors had built it. The answer was a simple, 'No,' that the wall was there when the Inca arrived about 500 years prior. Sacsayhuaman is a huge and complex site, and it is clear that varying techniques were used in its construction [...]. There is no practical reason why such huge blocks were required at Sacsayhuaman, and they are in fact the largest ever employed in the Americas. The common belief that it was a fortress of some kind constructed by the Inca is an idea that the Spanish came up with. For the Inca, it was in fact one of the most sacred of holy places.

Per qualche motivo, tutto sommato, lo avrebbe di nuovo voluto neonato. Squittente e catastrofico, e che lo guardasse con occhi adoranti. Adesso non squittiva e non bruciava, ma come adorazione era senz'altro sullo scarso.

She was an incomplete human yet a complete catastrophe, one that I curse and crave.

Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.… Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.… They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.

Something akin to a global scale combustion caused by perhaps a comet scraping our planet's atmosphere or a meteorite slamming into its surface, scorched the air, melted bedrock and altered the course of Earth's history. Exactly what it was is unclear, but this event jump-started what Kenneth Tankersley, an assistant professor of anthropology and geology at the University of Cincinnati, calls the last gasp of the last ice age. 'Imagine living in a time when you look outside and there are elephants walking around in Cincinnati,' Tankersley says. 'But by the time you're at the end of your years, there are no more elephants. It happens within your lifetime.

Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

Some days punch us in the gut so hard it seems we can feel the whole universe gasp with despair.

Sometimes catastrophes split you in half and even if all the pieces are there, they might not ever fit back together.

Sometimes I find myself in the eye of my own hurricane.… He was trouble in my life interrupting my world crashing into my dreams but I was a fucking storm the lightening to his thunder so, what more could a little chaos add but a beautiful catastrophic eruption.

Supongo que no hay manera de hacer regresar la nube con forma de hongo a esa bonita y reluciente esfera de uranio.

Sometimes, you can learn something completely mind-blowing in yoga and then totally forget about it the minute you need it the most. Or just kind of choose to forget it. 'I don't need no philosophy, I need fixing.' Which isn't to say nothing ever goes wrong, because it does; or that they're aren't parts of you that you just can't bring yourself to accept or maybe even detest at times (which I know is a strong word but it does apply), because I'm sure there are; or that there's no such thing as catastrophe, because there is. Oh my god, there is. And sometimes all you want to do is fix it.

The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality […]

Tankersley says while the cosmic strike had an immediate and deadly effect, the long term side effects were far more devastating, similar to Krakatoa's aftermath but many times worse, thus making it unique in modern human history. In the cataclysm's wake, toxic gas poisoned the air and clouded the sky, causing temperatures to plummet. The roiling climate challenged the existence of plant and animal populations, and it produced what Tankersley has classified as 'winners' and 'losers' of the Younger Dryas. He says inhabitants of this time period had three choices: relocate to another environment where they could make a similar living; downsize or adjust their way of living to fit the current surroundings; or swiftly go extinct. 'Winners' chose one of the first two options, while 'losers,' such as the woolly mammoth, took the last.

The commonalities that we find at all of the above locations include: 1) works in stone beyond the scale and technical prowess of the historically presumed builders, such as the Inca; 2) signs of construction interruptions and/or cataclysmic damage; and 3) oral traditions speaking of much earlier civilizations with advanced technological capabilities.

The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening.

The catastrophic event of 12,000 years ago, having melted much of the planet's ice and causing a global sea rise of some 350 feet, could have been so intense as to have raised global temperatures by six degrees Celsius [...]. The ending of the last ice age was not a gradual event, as most people would assume, but fast and intense.

The evidence claimed for an impact event includes a charred carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found at some 50 Clovis dated sites across the continent. The layer contains unusual materials (Nano diamonds, metallic micro spherules, carbon spherules, magnetic spherules, iridium, charcoal, soot, and fullerenes enriched in helium-3) interpreted as evidence of an impact event, at the very bottom of the black mat of organic material that marks the beginning of the Younger Dryas. The idea that Earth-based volcanism, or other natural processes, or human activity being responsible has been ruled out.

The spherules [that could only have formed from the combustion of rock] also were found at 17 other sites across four continents, an estimated 10 million metric tons' worth, further supporting the idea that whatever changed Earth did so on a massive scale. It's unlikely that a wildfire or thunderstorm would leave a geological calling card that immense, covering about 50 million square kilometers. 'We know something came close enough to Earth and it was hot enough that it melted rock, that's what these carbon spherules are. In order to create this type of evidence that we see around the world, it was big,' Tankersley says, contrasting the effects of an event so massive with the 1883 volcanic explosion on Krakatoa in Indonesia. 'When Krakatoa blew its stack, Cincinnati had no summer. Imagine winter all year round. That's just one little volcano blowing its top.

The precision of many of the flat surfaces [at Puma Punku] is astonishing. In some cases, they are almost as flat as laser perfection, and the idea that a Bronze Age culture like the Tiwanaku were responsible for this work is clearly impossible. What is also curious is that much of the stone has been partially or fully excavated from the red clay mud of the area, which infers either extreme age, or that a cataclysmic event occurred here, partially burying the site [...]. Further, there are blocks which appear to have been snapped in half - not by the invading Aymara, colonial Spanish, or more recently, but at a time in the distant past. The logic behind this statement is that there are no apparent tool marks or other evidence of attempts to break the stone.

There is nothing in human affairs that is a true subject for ridicule. Beneath comedy lies the ferment of tragedy; the farcical is but a cloak for coming catastrophe.

The storm that is coming is indifferent to your prayers.

To those who accuse catch phrases, like pseudoscience, conspiracy theorist, and now fake news that is not an argument but an excuse to continue on the wrong path without conscience bothering them, if you actually read Velikovsky's work he makes complete sense and they know they cannot beat him with facts he uses their own sources and connects the dots,so instead they use terms to slander, it's all they have

Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

Thunder and blood and night must usurp our parts, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece.

Tout grandit, m'a-t-il dit un jour, sauf les catastrophes. Elles sont énormes quand elles naissent; ensuite, elles rapetissent un peu plus chaque jour.

The water of such a nation (living godly) will not fail. Talking of harmony between the people of the land and nature. Natural catastrophes and disasters shall be far from such a people. There shall be rain in its time, sun in its time. Nature will respond adequately to the needs and desires of such a people.

Whenever a nation or a group of people is devoid of light, catastrophe comes, calamity hits, there is danger everywhere.

Une catastrophe, en général et quelle que soit sa nature, s'annonce avec fracas, a son lot de signes avant-coureurs, de lanceurs d'alerte, d'incroyables hasards et, parfois, certains miraculés. Mais malgré tout cela, l'homme ne parvient jamais à regarder la vérité en face, il ne peut pas croire que le pire puisse arriver et, continuellement, détourne le regard...

Up to a decade or two ago, the system production-nature (man's productive-exploitative relationship with nature and its resources) was perceived as a constant, whereas everybody was busy imagining different forms of the social organization of production and commerce (Fascism or Communism as alternatives to liberal capitalism); today, as Fredric Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming ‘breakdown of nature’, of the stoppage of all life on earth – it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe.

When a soul in sin, under the impetus of grace, turns to God, there is penance; but when a soul in sin refuses to change, God sends chastisement. This chastisement need not be external, and certainly it is never arbitrary; it comes as an inevitable result of breaking God’s moral law. But the entrenched forces of the modern world are irrational, men nowadays do not always interpret disasters as the moral events they are. When calamity strikes the flint of human hearts, sparks of sacred fire are kindled and men will normally begin to make an estimate of their true worth. In previous ages this was usual: a disordered individual could find his way back to peace because he lived in an objective world inspired by Christian order. But the frustrated man of today, having lost his faith in God, living as he does, in a disordered chaotic world, has no beacon to guide him. In times of trouble he sometimes turns in upon himself, like a serpent devouring its own tail. Given such a man, who worships the false trinity of (1) his own pride, which acknowledges no law; (2) his own sensuality, which makes earthly comfort it goal; (3) his license, which interprets liberty as the absences of all restraint and law—then a cancer is created which is impossible to cure except through an operation or calamity unmistakable as God’s action in history. It is always through sweat and blood and tears that the soul is purged of its animal egotism and laid open to the Spirit … Catastrophe can be to a world that has forgotten God what a sickness can be to a sinner; in the midst of it millions might be brought not to a voluntary, but to an enforced crisis. Such a calamity would put an end to Godlessness and make vast numbers of men, who might otherwise lose their souls, turn to God.

When flash of hope scans through your dreams. When news of goodness skims the surface of your expectations and bravery abates, break not, keep pressing less the dreams of your fingers suffer extinction.

Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.

Why the two [gigantic obelisks left unfinished at the Aswan quarry] were never finished is unknown. It appears that the workers simply stopped and never came back. The same possibly was the case at the Serapeum at Saqqara, where most of the 100 ton boxes were never finished. If these are pre-dynastic works as expected, then the great cataclysm of 12,000 years ago could have been the culprit - massive earthquakes and possibly solar blasts devastating all life in these and other areas. There is a massive horizontal crack in the bottom of the right channel of the great obelisk that also may have been the reason [...]. On another note, the left and right channels of the great obelisk would have been too narrow for workers to be shaping them with dolerite stone pounders. A lot of force would be required to remove any material at all, and having a foot or two of clearance would result in very little if any stone removal.

Your life is just a series of catastrophes followed by a poorly executed sword swallowing side show

Your name still rings a bell when you say something good, not by causing catastrophe in a bid to sound more interesting.

As soon as there's a crisis, there are people who take charge and want to control others. Climate-change catastrophe and human migration and immigration are great for corporate and governmental control over people, and we have to contend with that. I should say, I see corporate control behind everything that the government is working on right now.

Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

Do the math. Expect catastrophes. Whatever happens, stay the course.

Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.

I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.

As with almost every significant aspect of the Bush presidency, its handling of 9/11 was a catastrophe from start to finish.

Good stuff tends to happen gradually, whereas violence or catastrophes are deemed more newsworthy.

History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes we're basically headed towards holograms.

I'm planning a catastrophe.

In our grandparents' generation news of an earthquake in Nepal would reach around the world some days later. In our parents' day the nightly news communicated the catastrophe. Now it's a matter of minutes. We've barely processed one crisis, and then we hear of another.

No connection between Iraq and the 9/11 catastrophe.

I’ve never tried to keep a specific person alive before, and it’s much more troublesome than I would have believed. But that’s probably just because it’s you. Ordinary people seem to make it through the day without so many catastrophes.

Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience.