Best 97 quotes in «catastrophe quotes» category

The only concern which I have today is that we have a policy, a foreign policy, which enables us to avoid a catastrophe; which, if one understands it properly, is indescribable.

The universe remains dark. We are animals struck by catastrophe.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.

They [Democrats] are the troubadours and the crooners of catastrophe.

What is the alternative to peace? A catastrophe for both peoples [Palestine and Israel].

We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.

We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us.

Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'

While catastrophes do enter the lives of godly people, they attach themselves far more to people who reject Him.

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

You, Ms. Lane, are a menace to others! A walking, talking catastrophe in pink!

Wild globalization has benefited some, but it's been a catastrophe for most.

Comment pouvaient-ils accepter que l'histoire de leur vie s'efface sous le souffle d'une bombe? Alors, sur la page blanche du jardin, ils tentaient de la réécrire avec le seul alphabet dont ils disposaient. Ces meubles et ces bibelots formaient des mots qu'ils avaient agglutinés en phrases selon une syntaxe de la mémoire qui racontait l'histoire de leur vie.

An all-out attack on evolutionist thinking is possibly the only real hope our nations have of rescuing themselves from an inevitable social and moral catastrophe.

Catastrophe can be turned into an advantage, just as an advantage with incorrect application can be turned into a catastrophe.

Archaic myths from many parts of Europe (and around the world) refer to this event by mention of bright new stars which fell to Earth as seven flaming mountains, of how the oceans rose up in vast waves and totally engulfed the lands, and how summer was driven away with a cold darkness that lasted several years. In support of the mythological accounts of the vast waves covering the lands it is important to mention that many of the highest mountains in England, Scotland, and Ireland are littered with beds of sand and gravel containing sea shells deposited in the very recent geological past. Geology also gives irrefutable evidence that at two times in the recent past, around 7640 BC and 3100 BC, there have been complete reversals of the Earth's magnetic field caused by an outside influence, most probably a comet.

Catastrophe alone sparks man’s salvation. I don’t mean in the religious sense, although I guess it is appropriate there, too, because believers agree that salvation comes only after death. It is part of the human near-tragedy that we learn more from loss than from gain. Gain binds us until we stumble and fall into that black pit then we find the spirit of understanding and truth. And if we fall far enough and still persist, we find our salvation.

Er bestrich sich Stirn und Brust, unwissend, was er aus seinem Zustande machen sollte, und ein unsägliches Wonnegefühl ergriff ihn, als ein Westwind, vom Meere her, sein wiederkehrendes Leben anwehte, und sein Auge sich nach allen Richtungen über die blühende Gegend von St. Jago hinwandte.

Ignorance has one virtue: persistence. It will insist through dogged persistence on leading others to follow its vision no matter how misguided. Ignorance will drive the world to the brink of failure and catastrophe and beyond into the abyss with arrogance and anger because wisdom is often too polite to fight. Wisdom doesn’t like to impose its will, but that is all ignorance understands—force over free will and choice. Sooner or later the world comes to its senses, but oh the damage that has been done.

Evil spawns mayhem while benevolence repairs; doing good comforts the living while prayers are extended to the one who attends to the dead.

For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky. The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls. A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.

It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica'),

In my head, when the gales are riding wild, I steer towards catastrophe then write about it.

In order to learn history right, one must listen to the right people

It's a blip, not a catastrophe.

It was like we had known all along that the sky was going to fall and then it fell and we pretended to be surprised.

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.

It's called the Infinity Effect.

Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.

Many of the other megalithic works at Machu Pic'chu show large gaps as in the two previous photos. The width of these gaps is very similar, and again suggest that a massive earthquake cataclysm, moving in a east-west direction, affected the site in the very distant past [...]. A geologist who inspected this with the author stated quite emphatically that such a drop would not have been the result of poor foundation work when the structure was made, but far more likely, again, the result of a catastrophic earthquake. She also stated that such an earthquake would have caused the rough stone and clay mortar buildings to be completely demolished. This, then, clearly indicates that the megalithic core of Machu Pic'chu, which comprises about 5-10 percent, is older than the Inca, and may in fact have been made prior to the cataclysmic event of about 12,000 years ago.

Many people are the cause of their own misfortune in life, and they either blame the devil for it or hang it on God.

One way or another, I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years which, as geological time goes, is the mere blink of an eye. By then I hope and believe that our ingenious race will have found a way to slip the surly bonds of Earth and will therefore survive the disaster. The same of course may not be possible for the millions of other species that inhabit the Earth, and that will be on our conscience as a race. I think we are acting with reckless indifference to our future on planet Earth. At the moment, we have nowhere else to go, but in the long run the human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. I just hope we can avoid dropping the basket before we learn how to escape from Earth. But we are, by nature, explorers. Motivated by curiosity. This is a uniquely human quality. It is this driven curiosity that sent explorers to prove the Earth is not flat and it is the same instinct that sends us to the stars at the speed of thought, urging us to go there in reality. And whenever we make a great new leap, such as the Moon landings, we elevate humanity, bring people and nations together, usher in new discoveries and new technologies. To leave Earth demands a concerted global approach—everyone should join in. We need to rekindle the excitement of the early days of space travel in the 1960s. The technology is almost within our grasp. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth. If we stay, we risk being annihilated.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.