Catastrophic Quotes

#1. And maybe that's why the only thing that keeps me going is my belief that we are capable of being better than we are ... capable of taking action to avoid a catastrophic future.

Dan Brown

#2. The tendency of those committed to the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming to unquestioningly adopt the assumptions, at every stage, that maximise the expectation of calamity should alert us that groupthink is driving the movement.

Peter Lilley

#3. My addiction to you is definitely a catastrophic weakness

Julie Hockley

#4. I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.

Will Storr

#5. Conservative Denyers and Delayers are the main reason America lacks the consensus and the political will to take up the fight against catastrophic climate change.

Joseph J. Romm

#6. 'Ten Years Later' is about the journey six extraordinary people take with time. Each has experienced a game-changing event - perhaps a life-threatening illness or a catastrophic personal loss.

Hoda Kotb

#7. Errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumours, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to engage in needless wars, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children.

Noreena Hertz

#8. If the 'Athens Spring' - when the Greek people courageously rejected the catastrophic austerity conditions of the previous bailouts - has one lesson to teach, it is that Greece will recover only when the European Union makes the transition from 'We the states' to 'We the European people.'

Yanis Varoufakis

#9. If you wake during the night, any thoughts and feelings you might have are from your Chimp and they are often very disturbing, catastrophic and lacking in perspective. In the morning you are likely to regret engaging with these thoughts and feelings because you will see things differently.

Steve Peters

#10. People working on climate change should prepare for catastrophic success.

David Titley

#11. We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.

Steven Johnson

#12. I've been to enough other countries in the world to know what happens when you have socialized single-payer health care. It works. People don't get sick as much. They don't lose their life savings with a catastrophic illness like cancer or AIDS.

Jello Biafra

#13. If a catastrophic event wipes out a large portion of House members, America needs to know this body, elected by the people, will be quickly and legally reconstituted and will continue to function.

Charles W. Pickering

#14. We have to believe that our prayers, if pure and powerful can transform any catastrophic situation, regardless of its magnitude.

Pooja Ruprell

#15. Lawsuits are rare and catastrophic experiences for the vast majority of men, and even when the catastrophe ensues, the controversy relates most often not to the law, but to the facts. In countless litigations, the law Is so clear that judges have no discretion.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

#16. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that if the United States continued to kill life at its beginnings with abortion, at its mid-day with the handicapped, and at twilight with euthanasia, it would lead to the catastrophic midnight of nuclear war.

Kelly Bowring

#17. I have the profoundest respect for people who behave in a generous way because of religion. But I come from a country where the misuse of religion has had catastrophic consequences. One must judge people not by what faith they proclaim but by what they do.

Amin Maalouf

#18. Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

Greg Graffin

#19. History was interesting to the extent that it was catastrophic and, while that might make absorbing viewing, it made horrible living.

Isaac Asimov

#20. Generally speaking, if a guy breaks your jaw and leg and cuts off your robotic arm, you file charges and get a restraining order. The only exception is when subtle machinations are needed to save the world from a massive, catastrophic alien takeover. But in no other circumstance.

Shannon Hale

#21. We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

Bill McKibben

#22. When it comes to immigration reform, now is the time ... I've never seen a better political environment ... I'm not doing immigration reform to solve the Republican Party's political problem. I'm trying to save our nation from, I think, a shortage of labor and a catastrophic broken system.

Lindsey Graham

#23. You don't have the judgment after you've had the drink. If something truly catastrophic had happened that evening, I don't know how I could have lived with myself. I feel like I've gotten a second chance.

Tracey Gold

#24. Trying to win a power struggle is like trying to win a nuclear war. You may achieve your goal, but not without catastrophic casualties on both sides.

Jamie Raser

#25. American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative - and sometimes catastrophic - consequences in many other countries around the world.

Thomas Sowell

#26. [Plot is] the gradual perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium.

John Barth

#27. Super achievers don't waste time in unproductive thoughts, esoteric thoughts or catastrophic thoughts. They think constructively and they know that their level of thinking determines their success.

Shiv Khera

#28. People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#29. Just relax. When I was younger, I made myself the victim of catastrophic thinking. Anything that went wrong was the end of the world. But as I've gotten older, I've learned to stop myself and say, 'Hey babe, calm down. Tomorrow there will be sun.'

Gabourey Sidibe

#30. In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.

Edward Abbey

#31. The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.

Wendell Berry

#32. Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt - and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.

Henry Hazlitt

#33. This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.

Doris Lessing

#34. Religion is the worst thing that ever happened to mankind - the ironic part is that it's presented as a good thing, and its effect is absolutely catastrophic to individuals and to societies.

George Carlin

#35. We are already perilously close to killing off the top of the oceanic food chain - with catastrophic consequences that we can't begin to imagine. Let us not, in the heat of anger, reduce the already devastated population of great white sharks by one more member.

Peter Benchley

#36. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

E. E. Cummings

#37. NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.

Burt Rutan

#38. This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system.

Jerry Brown

#39. The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti.

Stan Goff

#40. Jeremy Corbyn had shown a catastrophic failure of leadership and must step down to make way for someone with the backbone to confront racism and anti-Semitism.

Ruth Smeeth

#41. This all sounds like a great idea with no chance of catastrophic failure.

Andy Weir

#42. I don't think the emergence of a superhuman intelligence would be at all catastrophic but much more likely to be beneficial - just as long as we don't start trying to interfere with it!

John L. Casti

#43. In Israel, there's a lot to learn from anyone, because to live there you've got to deal with the truth. Things happen real fast. Your day goes from cool to catastrophic in one second. Israelis know that the cafe you're in could blow up, or the shopping mall, and they rock that.

Henry Rollins

#44. It would be catastrophic if one day these fundamentalists Christians gain enough political power to enforce their literal understanding of Mosaic Law.

Mel White

#45. making judgments under the pressure of a crisis, about weighing the relative merits of various choices with potentially catastrophic outcomes.

Timothy F. Geithner

#46. The bottom line is that there are very few families who have a family member with a catastrophic medical condition such as RDEB that can survive financially without help.

Silvia Corradin

#47. Sedimentation in the past has often been very rapid indeed and very spasmodic. This may be called the "Phenomenon of the Catastrophic Nature of the Stratigraphical Record."

D. V. Ager

#48. Under communism, prices were not allowed to reflect economic reality. Under capitalism, prices don't reflect ecological reality. In the long run, the capitalist flaw
if uncorrected
may prove to be the more catastrophic.

Denis Hayes

#49. I'm just one gigantic ball of rancid fear and self-consciousness. I'm entirely fueled by fear, so the fact that I knew it could be a catastrophic disaster made me unable to sleep, and made me work quite hard.

Eddie Redmayne

#50. If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

Paul Johnson

#51. It is not acceptable that we continue to see thousands of acres burn because of forest fires, because of poor management on our forests, big kill, and we have these catastrophic situations take place when we are not able to take action.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

#52. Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence ... Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now - Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#53. We'd met at university, where he was studying medicine and I was studying social awkwardness and a catastrophic inability to cope with deadlines.

Tammy Cohen

#54. Our situation, with global warming and air quality and all of that, has gotten to be catastrophic.

Morgan Freeman

#55. Rossiter wasn't really on leave. He'd had a catastrophic fall a few years back while saving his wife's life and had lost a leg. He

Pamela Clare

#56. As much success came to him, my father stayed true to his promise. He built the hospital to help the most helpless children with catastrophic illnesses.

Marlo Thomas

#57. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.

Leon Trotsky

#58. Life without Music would be a Mistake. Life without Books would be Catastrophic!

Nandini Deka

#59. The fact that some people can push others to the point of thinking that their lives are not worthy is catastrophic.

Melissa Reeves

#60. But even though catastrophic oppression brought about a process of objectification and dehumanization, the absolute negation of humanity was not possible because a damaged human spirit seeks to resurrect and reconstruct itself; it also seeks self-consciousness.

Clovis E. Semmes

#61. For thirty minutes I sat back and felt the glimmer of pride that historically precedes the most catastrophic falls.

Antony John

#62. Labeling and diagnosis is a catastrophic way to communicate. Telling other people what's wrong with them greatly reduces, almost to zero, the probability that we're going to get what we're after.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#63. A starting point is an essential component of success. No success is realized without a starting point. Starting with the inappropriate starting point will consequently be catastrophic. Therefore, we are of the opinion that success is crucial, and so is a starting point

Khem Veasna

#64. Look at the world and think about a catastrophic disaster where the cell phone towers went dead. How would you ever be able to 'TEXT your next door neighbor to see if they were okay

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#65. THERE must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know it ceases to exist.

Jan-Philipp Sendker

#66. I have always been very diversified, so I have never suffered a catastrophic loss. I spread my money around the way a large institutional investor does. I use different brokerage firms. I manage some of my accounts myself ...

Ben Stein

#67. Removing substantial fuel loads from our forests helps prevent catastrophic fire and better protects species, watersheds and neighboring communities that call them home.

Greg Walden

#68. As the GAO report recognizes, the long-term health of our forests relies on additional fuel reduction options and funding to reduce the risks that catastrophic fire poses to our nation's ecosystems, communities and federal budgetary resources.

Greg Walden

#69. Others were simply possessed by a feeling that they had made a catastrophic mistake. They had made an irreversible error in coming to England, and their lives would never recover - their lives would never again be their lives, but the story of this huge mistake that they had made.

John Lanchester

#70. Done poorly, Conway's Law will prevent teams from working safely and independently; instead, they will be tightly-coupled together, all waiting on each other for work to be done, with even small changes creating potentially global, catastrophic consequences.

Gene Kim

#71. Folklore and mythology, as well as man's catastrophic disregard for nature, are the meat of Joseph D'Lacey's horror. But the prime cuts are always compassion and surprise.

Adam Nevill

#72. People tend to take sides in these discussions. They feel obligated to say baseball is in catastrophic circumstance or no problem at all. I think extremes are misleading. I think there's a problem and it's of modest dimensions.

Andrew Zimbalist

#73. Only if everyone buys insurance can insurers afford to cover people with preexisting conditions or pay the costs of catastrophic diseases.

Robert Reich

#74. Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

James Buchan

#75. I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.

Augusten Burroughs

#76. We have a lot of choice about whether to interpret something as adversity or as opportunity. I see in myself the tendency at times to make situations worse than they have to be because of my catastrophic interpretation.

Marianne Williamson

#77. Agriculture is in danger. The whole world is in danger. We need to learn to adapt. If we
don't, we'll face catastrophic consequence on a scale you cannot imagine.

Cary Fowler

#78. The captivity of Carswell Thorne had gotten off to a rocky start, what with the catastrophic soap rebellion and all.

Marissa Meyer

#79. Imagine what will happen to this nation if large numbers of American women start using the Wonderbra. It will be catastrophic. The male half of the population will be nothing but mindless drooling Zombies of Lust. Granted, this is also true now, but it will be even worse.

Dave Barry

#80. As the human population continues to grow, it will become harder if not impossible for the human species to manage itself.

This has potentially catastrophic implications.

Virginia Arthur

#81. For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they were in fact falling in love with someone they didn't yet know enough to want.

Andrew Solomon

#82. The thing that keeps me awake at night is a nexus between terrorism and massive destruction ... the possibility that a terrorist organization could either acquire a ready-made weapon or fabricate something improvised that would have a catastrophic effect for us.

Michele Flournoy

#83. The catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons require that it be treated as a top priority. Disarmament will work better than any alternative in reducing the risk of use.

Ban Ki-moon

#84. Freedom has more often been lost in small steps by progressive incrementalism, than it has been by catastrophic upheavals such as violence or war.

James Madison

#85. When corporations are given the ring of Gyges, we can expect catastrophic results (for the ecosystem, the banking system, public health, etc.).

Jonathan Haidt

#86. Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life.

Jeannette Walls

#87. One thing I will not compromise over is whether or not Congress should pay the tab for a bill they've already racked up. If Congress refuses to give the United States the ability to pay its bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy could be catastrophic.

Barack Obama

#88. Women always think in the catastrophic, and when there is a calamity to rectify that might require a unmarried granddaughter, there older women will always act. Their powers of foresight and vigilance might make any disheveled or nubile young haggage ready for the altar in five minutes.

Michelle Franklin

#89. Global warming is real and human activity is the main cause. The consequences are mainly negative and headed toward catastrophic, unless we act. However, the good news is that we can meet this challenge. It is not too late, and we have everything we need to get started.

Al Gore

#90. No one in Brady had seemed even remotely aware that the world was teetering on the brink of a catastrophic depression. Perhaps the mountains kept the place isolated and secure. Or perhaps life there had been depressed for so long another crash wouldn't matter.

John Grisham

#91. The Communist Manifesto was correct but we see the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie yielding to democratic organizations. In my judgment success lies in a steady [peaceful] advance [rather] than in a catastrophic crash.

Eduard Bernstein

#92. How easy it was to capitalize on a person's own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.

Robert Galbraith

#93. We want to look at how we would respond because, as hard as we work to prevent terrorist attacks here North America, if we have a catastrophic terrorist attack, it is the military that is going to have to go in at the request of civilian authorities.

Paul Cellucci

#94. One person's actions can alter the course of history, and a political or military mischance can touch off a catastrophic reaction that has repercussions over centuries.

Timothy Venning

#95. The economic impact of illegal immigration on taxpayers is catastrophic.

Ric Keller

#96. Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words 'climate change' in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of inaction, the movement has been in a funk.

Jeff Goodell

#97. I feel that right from the start the players were prepared to experience catastrophic results with comments like: 'It's going to be tough and we are going to need time'.

Lilian Thuram

#98. 'Gathering Blue' was a separate book. I wanted to explore what a society might become after a catastrophic world event. Only at the end did I realize I could make it connect to 'The Giver.'

Lois Lowry

#99. You're one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan.

Nick Cave

#100. We've taken the lifeblood out of Christianity and put Kool-Aid in its place so that it tastes better to the crowds, and the consequences are catastrophic. ~Follow Me, pg. 7

David Platt