Best 97 quotes in «catastrophe quotes» category

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity.

Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience.

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

One man's death: that is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand dead: that is a statistic

Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.

Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course, foreseen.

No connection between Iraq and the 9/11 catastrophe.

So many catastrophes in love are only accidents of egotism.

Sometimes a catastrophe is simply a course correction.

Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes.

The biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to.

So many awful things have happened in Karachi, it's true. It has its own crazy rhythm. Even as crazy as other news is in Pakistan, the city manages to beat that in the frequency of catastrophes.

The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented - and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.