Quotes About Catastrophe

#1. We are so lucky to live here, he would say, and she couldn't disagree. They were lucky that the earth had conspired to heap up such startling beauty in one place, and they were lucky that it hadn't all fallen apart yet in a a geological catastrophe.

Chris Adrian

#2. But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.

Anne Michaels

#3. Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

Susan Sontag

#4. Three-quarters of Americans who went bankrupt due to medical costs actually had insurance; it's just that the insurance they had didn't actually protect them from catastrophe.

Jonathan Chait

#5. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

Albert Einstein

#6. Give what name you like to my presentiments, but I am afraid that my happiness will be paid for by some horrible catastrophe.

Honore De Balzac

#7. ..the sense of a catastrophe perpetually invoked and avoided creates a rapture in whose depths horror and pleasure coincide...

Michel Leiris

#8. Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.

Honore De Balzac

#9. What I know for sure is that behind every catastrophe, there are great lessons to be learned. Among the many that we as a country need to get is that as long as we play the "us and them" game, we don't evolve as people, as a nation, as a planet.

Oprah Winfrey

#10. Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.

Ludwig Von Mises

#11. I'm planning a catastrophe.

Leonard Cohen

#12. As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

James Payn

#13. They, our parents, lived through a great catastrophe, and we needed to live through it, too. Otherwise we'd never become real people. That's how we're made. If we just work each day and eat well - that would be strange and intolerable! We

Svetlana Alexievich

#14. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.

Tony Judt

#15. Sometimes, I have a dared dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice--which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency--that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.

Malcolm X

#16. ...life was a glorious catastrophe.

Jess Walter

#17. Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.

William Irwin Thompson

#18. 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.

Andrew Solomon

#19. Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

Alain De Botton

#20. The actual theme of corruption can condemn humanity and this conflict can be resolved when people are diligent to put an end to this catastrophe as a community.

Saaif Alam

#21. If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#22. How someone wants to explain catastrophe isn't important--that's what I know now. When shit happens, it doesn't really matter what asshole is responsible.

Catherine Lacey

#23. Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.

Germaine Greer

#24. The way you can be careful of the catastrophe that success can bring is by paying attention to something else that comes along with success - responsibility.

El DeBarge

#25. Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come. I think people in the mass media, journalists, film makers and others, you can contribute to the collective awakening if you are awake and then your life will embody that awakening.

Nhat Hanh

#26. Life is catastrophe ... Everything is unfair. Who do we complain to in this shitty place? ... We all lose everything that matters in the end ... it's possible to play it with a kind of joy.p.767, The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt

#27. Oh, yes. Wife. Children. Home. Everything. The full catastrophe.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#28. To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a set of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.

Jodi Picoult

#29. I am nothing more than the consequence of catastrophe.

Tahereh Mafi

#30. Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe.

Carl Sagan

#31. Meeting smaller emergencies and learning to deal with them had given me the confidence to deal with this larger emergency. So, little by little, I found out how to do things. After each catastrophe you don't worry so much the next time, and each time you emerge stronger from your victory.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#32. I'll tickle his catastrophe.

James Joyce

#33. Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.

Lev Grossman

#34. But what was making her unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe that had wrecked her life?She raised her head and looked around, as though trying to find the cause of her suffering.

Gustave Flaubert

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

Edward Teller

#36. If left unchecked, global change will create violent conflict, torrential storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe.

Valerie Jarrett

#37. We have been terrorised by what happened in America and we express our condolences to the American people who suffered from this unexpected catastrophe and a new world war.

Muammar Al-Gaddafi

#38. Using figure B, we can stipulate that an existential risk is equivalent to (i) all red-dot catastrophes, and (ii) any black-dot catastrophe that significantly compromises human well-being.*

Phil Torres

#39. Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

Pat Conroy

#40. The runner who is in peak condition is only a razor's edge from catastrophe.

George Sheehan

#41. As long as we are a single-planet species, we are vulnerable to extinction by a planetwide catastrophe, natural or self-induced. Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.

David Grinspoon

#42. The awful catastrophe of their quarrel had evaporated in a commonplace. He

Winston Graham

#43. Ability to Function Despite Imminent Catastrophe.

Mary Roach

#44. We saw what happens with Bolsheviks. It was another catastrophe. I don't have the solution. The moviemaker can ask questions but not give solutions.

Costa-Gavras

#45. Pending catastrophe is not an easy notion to entertain, much less sustain. Americans, moreover, have a low tolerance for doom and gloom. We are the nation of optimism, after all. We elect leaders who promise hope and change. We are the shining city on a hill. But what happens when the lights go out?

Kathleen Parker

#46. As for the role of France and Germany: French politics is often more self-confident then German politics due to the catastrophe in the first half of the last century. If Berlin and Paris don't agree, then it is difficult to make progress in Europe.

Wolfgang Schauble

#47. Ever more people are alert to the challenge of global poverty and global warming. We know that solutions are at hand. We will not sleepwalk into catastrophe. We have the capacity to forsee and forestall, and I believe we will find the will to act

Jonathan Dimbleby

#48. Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!

Philip Roth

#49. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero ... Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.

Frank Herbert

#50. For similar folly, our own country, in the transition from the colonial period, also paid a fearful price; and from a like catastrophe the United States has been twice saved in our time by the arguments formulated by Turgot.

Andrew Dickson White

#51. Just when you think you're having a scene without Simon, he drops in to remind you that everyone else is a supporting character in his catastrophe.

Rainbow Rowell

#52. It was the wrong place at the wrong time kind of shit that had quickly turned into a catastrophe of epic proportions

Madeline Sheehan

#53. There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe.

Robert Cailliau

#54. 50-100 years from now we are all going to be eating a plant based diet. Whether that happens through a catastrophe or a peaceful sustainable life giving way is based on whether we make the right choices now and how we fight in this struggle together.

Mark Bittman

#55. One accident or terrorist strike involving high-level waste would endanger lives and cause a catastrophe that would leave millions of dollars in damages and take years to clean up

Shelley Berkley

#56. The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.

Leonard Cohen

#57. All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution ...

Leon Trotsky

#58. Catastrophe is change on the fast track. Disaster is a laboratory for adaptability.

Robert Watson

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

Michael Lewis

#60. I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

Janette Turner Hospital

#61. Marrying any man is risky. Marrying a famous man is kissing catastrophe.

John Colton

#62. Well, our concern has to do with the period prior to 9/11, up to and including the catastrophe that occurred. And thank goodness, we're not obliged to make assessments of what's going on now and deal with these current events.

Richard Ben-Veniste

#63. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened'; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.

Leon Trotsky

#64. The moment we think in the terms of 'Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism', the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims.

Slavoj Zizek

#65. For those of us in the financial world, Black Friday has a strong negative connotation, referring to a stock market catastrophe.

Mark Skousen

#66. Extinction catches Man by surprise because no one can even imagine that such a catastrophe can happen to an intelligent species.

Bill Gaede

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

Al Gore

#68. Government cannot solve all our problems, even in normal times, much less during a catastrophe of nature that reminds man how little he is, despite all his big talk.

Thomas Sowell

#69. We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is - on the brink of catastrophe - torn by polarizing hate, and how it's a shame that we can't work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!

Jon Stewart

#70. The clearest sign of coming catastrophe is when all the bad shit in your life suddenly stops. You're entering the eye of the shitstorm.

Leah Raeder

#71. It's a blip, not a catastrophe.

Donald J. Trump

#72. So you think your life has become a catastrophe

Oh, but it has to be for you to grow, boy.

Supertramp

#73. The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.

Simon Winchester

#74. What degree of proof about the human catastrophe from global climate change do we need, before we are motivated to act to prevent it?

Eric Chivian

#75. The 1953 coup was a catastrophe which slammed him [Mosaddegh] to floor, and from which Iran never fully recovered

Christopher De Bellaigue

#76. Catastrophe as Catalyst in the Ontology of Joy, or Hurricane Parties on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Camille: An In-depth Study of Eleven Victims Who Elected to Stay Compared with Eleven Random Control Subjects Who Elected to Leave"?

Walker Percy

#77. There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.

John F. Kennedy

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

Noam Chomsky

#79. It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts.

Mark Ruffalo

#80. Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.

Italo Calvino

#81. Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man's vanity to be loathsome.

Hans Arp

#82. Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He's eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe.

Mario Batali

#83. Newspapers have developed what might be called a vested interest in catastrophe. If they can spot a fight, they play up that fight. If they can uncover a tragedy, they will headline that tragedy.

Harry Allen Overstreet

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

Tony Campolo

#85. We naturally take in the catastrophes of our friends a pleasure which genuinely does not preclude friendship. This is partly but not entirely because we enjoy being empowered as helpers. The unexpected or inappropriate catastrophe is especially piquant.

Iris Murdoch

#86. We see an extensive program of dismantling state institutions ... These are ingredients for catastrophe.

Iyad Allawi

#87. Most of us would rather risk a catastrophe than read the instructions.

Mignon McLaughlin

#88. A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly.

Max Hastings

#89. To you, the people of Flint, I say, as I have before, I am sorry and I will fix it. No citizen of this great state should endure this kind of catastrophe. Government failed you. Federal, state and local leaders by breaking the trust you placed in us.

Rick Snyder

#90. I would be very happy to see 3.5 billion humans wiped out from the face of the earth within the next 150 or 200 years and I am quite prepared to go myself with this majority ... let us all look forward to the day when the catastrophe strikes us down!

John Aspinall

#91. If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.

Niall Ferguson

#92. She turned to John to share the joke, and he was transfixed, looking into the catastrophe of her sagging, bleary-eyed face.

R.A. MacAvoy

#93. That was for instance the case in Mocambique a couple of years ago, during the flooding catastrophe. Instead of co-ordinating assistance properly, to much time and resources was spent on fighting about the same helicopters and local guides.

Anna Lindh

#94. The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.

Rebecca Solnit

#95. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we'll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people.

Gabe Newell

#96. Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.

Joe Hill

#97. Anything done without character can only end in catastrophe.

Bidemi Mark-Mordi

#98. If the sexual revolution has been a medical disaster, socially it has been a catastrophe. Why do the media not report and explore the tragic results of the sexual revolution? Because many are collaborators.

Pat Buchanan

#99. The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

H.G.Wells

#100. Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.

Michael J. Fox