Best 97 quotes in «catastrophe quotes» category

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.

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

Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience.

I'm planning a catastrophe.

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

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

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

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

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

No connection between Iraq and the 9/11 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.

Sometimes a catastrophe is simply a course correction.

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.

So many catastrophes in love are only accidents of egotism.

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

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.

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

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 recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 a blip, not a catastrophe.

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

It's called the Infinity Effect.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.