Quotes About Catastrophes

#1. You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?

Melina Marchetta

#2. Proposing inner-life solutions to our political and economic catastrophes is something done, say the critics, only by people who've spent more time in la-la land than in the 'real world.'

Parker Palmer

#3. In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

Henry Kissinger

#4. Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

Norman Maclean

#5. I had grown into a worrier, a girl on constant guard for catastrophes large and small, for the disappointments I now sensed were hidden all around us right in plain sight.

Karen Thompson Walker

#6. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

Werner Herzog

#7. Don't just sit there and worry. Be proactive. Do something - anything - about what's worrying you so you can gain information, focus and control over the situation. I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened.

Mark Twain

#8. Sometimes you're not even sure which of your stories were failures. There are things I've written that I thought were complete catastrophes when I finished with them that have gone on to generate some of my most positive feedback.

Len Wein

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

Martin Scorsese

#10. Great breakthroughs are always followed by great catastrophes.

Rosalia De Castro

#11. Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide

Enrico Fermi

#12. Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and
tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.

Peter Drucker

#13. It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Virginia Woolf

#14. Nobles' sons are one of nature's great destructive forces, like floods or tornadoes. When you're struck with one of these catastrophes, the only thing an average man can do is grit his teeth and try to minimize the damage.

Patrick Rothfuss

#15. What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind's habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes.

Isaac Asimov

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

David Benioff

#17. Retribution seen in natural catastrophes is manufactured by all too eager
and all too pious people, each one convinced the world will end but spare them and them
alone. But we all know, the world is inherited by the obnoxious, not the righteous

Steven Erikson

#18. Geologists have usually had recourse for the explanation of these changes to the supposition of sundry violent and extraordinary catastrophes, cataclysms, or general revolutions having occurred in the physical state of the earth's surface.

George Julius Poulett Scrope

#19. -only human beings can recognize catastrophes, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes.

Max Frisch

#20. Take a look at anyone's life. Take a look at your own. In the long fold catastrophe that makes up your three-score years and ten you will encounter many cusp catastrophes along the way.

William Boyd

#21. 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.

Stephenie Meyer

#22. Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages - and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.

Norman Borlaug

#23. I'm convinced that the catastrophes of the next two decades will be so vast as to bring about a world where life, if it survives, will be far simpler - and the technologies, too. Then we will have come full circle to something like life on the savanna.

Kirkpatrick Sale

#24. The dignified catastrophes of tragedy bear little resemblance to the slow ruin inflicted by life.

Mason Cooley

#25. The real catastrophes are always different-unimaginable, unprepared for, unknown

Karen Thompson Walker

#26. The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a good murder; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes break on their editions.

Pete Hamill

#27. The complicated engines manufactured by men demand, if one really wants to use them, much calm. Ever since our love for machines replaced the love we used to have for our fellow man, catastrophes proceed to increase.

Man Ray

#28. 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.

Andrew Coyle Bradley

#29. There was something exquisite and poetic about those fucking catastrophes.

Don Lee

#30. My architectural drive was to design new types of buildings to help poor people, especially following natural disasters and catastrophes ... I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.

Frei Otto

#31. It was essential that someone, somewhere, even if it was only the fairy folk, should know that the human race had produced more than wars, catastrophes, and ultimately its own slow and painful self-destruction. It had produced things of exquisite and lasting beauty as well.

Kate Thompson

#32. When the news first came that Japan had attacked us my first feeling was of relief that ... a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed.

Henry L. Stimson

#33. We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.

Rose Macaulay

#34. Despite catastrophes that defy the imagination, daily life goes on, forgetfulness seems to conquer memory, the world keeps mysteriously renewing itself.

Edward Hirsch

#35. For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

Oscar Wilde

#36. Unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes ...

Al Gore

#37. Notwithstanding, therefore, that we have not witnessed of a large continent, yet, as we may predict the future occurrence of such catastrophes, we are authorized to regard them as part of the present order of Nature.

Charles Lyell

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

Max Anders

#39. War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.

Albert Pike

#40. The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun.

Steven Pinker

#41. Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.

Barbara Kingsolver

#42. Everyone fears catastrophes and disasters and crashes and deaths, and people who attack you in the dark. You made all that worse for me. I felt something might happen which would separate me from you, and I could not deal with life without you. (23)

Sarah Ferguson

#43. Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault.

P.D. James

#44. Death for [a Christian] is no accident. With God there are no accidents, no tragedies, and no catastrophes as far as His children are concerned.

Billy Graham

#45. Humanity must have a speed of advance higher than the speed of advance of cosmic disasters or big global catastrophes!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#46. In her life, moments of happiness were only gaps between mass catastrophes. She was now afraid of happiness.

Liu Cixin

#47. The military has been tremendously important in the past during catastrophes and in protecting the population. But it shouldn't become an auxiliary police force.

Otto Schily

#48. War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

Georges Clemenceau

#49. Catastrophes have a somber way of arranging things.

Victor Hugo

#50. I welcome a discussion on a long-term, pro-active approach to disaster relief for Americans. Until Congress arrives at a conclusion, however, we must continue to honor America's honorable tradition of helping Americans recover for natural catastrophes.

Cedric Richmond

#51. One of the things government should be around for is to deal with catastrophes. It should do that well. To me, that's a government function, and we shouldn't be playing political games with it.

Gary Johnson

#52. So many catastrophes in love are only accidents of egotism.

Hector Bianciotti

#53. The dramatic sufferings of adults and all the cruel fantasies of those of my own age, who seemed abandoned to their own impulses in the midst of so many catastrophes, appeared to inscribe themselves on the walls around me.

Antoni Tapies

#54. No wires tender even as nerves
can transmit the impact of
our seasons, our catastrophes
while we are closed inside them

Margaret Atwood

#55. And our sailors of space have a legend of the furthest star of all, where the gods lay their plans against us, or plot the catastrophes of the end of time: the pachacuti. We call this undiscovered star Karu, which means 'far'.'
'As we speak of Ultima,' Quintus mused.

Stephen Baxter

#56. Samovar is the most essential thing in Russia, especially at times of particularly awful, sudden, and eccentric catastrophes and misfortunes

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#57. I'm sure, you'll never again have a problem with a tool or a machine. No more hammered thumbs, no vacuum-cleaner catastrophes." "That'll take a second miracle." "Because all that clumsiness was never anything but an elaborate excuse not to have a gun, not to learn how to use one.

Dean Koontz

#58. 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.

Margaret Heffernan

#59. Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.

Anais Nin

#60. Want a happier, more content life? I highly recommend the down-to-earth methods you'll find in 'Mindfulness.' Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman have teamed up to give us scientifically grounded techniques we can apply in the midst of our everyday challenges and catastrophes.

Daniel Goleman

#61. You don't cause problems. You cause catastrophes.

Ilona Andrews

#62. It is easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#63. Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.

Theodore Roosevelt

#64. In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.

Kate Morton

#65. The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.

John Ruskin

#66. AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Susan Sontag

#67. How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.

H.G.Wells

#68. One of the strangest catastrophes that is in any history. A great king, with strong armies and mighty fleets, a great treasure and powerful allies, fell all at once, and his whole strength, like a spider's web, was ... irrecoverably broken at a touch.

Gilbert Burnet

#69. Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it - likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.

Viktor E. Frankl

#70. I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.

Alice Munro

#71. Carrying on as usual carries enormous risks, condemning today's students to a world of constant insecurity and frequent catastrophes.

William H. Calvin

#72. 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

#73. The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other worldwide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.

James Howard Kunstler

#74. We shared. Parents. Home. Pets. Celebrations. Catastrophes. Secrets. And the threads of our experience became so interwoven that we are linked. I can never be utterly lonely, knowing you share the planet.

Pam Brown

#75. Few people know anything of the English history but what they learn from Shakespear; for our story is rather a tissue of personal adventures and catastrophes than a series of political events.

Elizabeth Montagu

#76. 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

#77. Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Isaac Asimov

#78. We have believing in this innocent feeling of nothing will ever happen to us, because all catastrophes always broad and happening to anyone else.

Asne Seierstad

#79. What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes ...

Joy Williams

#80. Your life is just a series of catastrophes followed by a poorly executed sword swallowing side show

Shannon Lynette

#81. 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

#82. Tactical catastrophes are rarely the outcome of a single poor decision. Small compromises incrementally close off options until a commander is forced into actions he would never choose freely.

Nathaniel Fick

#83. Because of Christ, even our catastrophes have purpose. God is preparing our character for the time when we will see Him face to face.

Kenneth Boa

#84. From small mistakes come great catastrophes;

Justin Cronin

#85. Uncritical followership and habits of silent obedience give rise to the corruptions of power, or sometimes simply to avoidable catastrophes. For

Jonathan Sacks

#86. The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic's Catastrophes.

Norman Davies

#87. Human beings will line up for miles to buy a bucket of catastrophes, but don't try selling sunshine and light - you'll go broke.

Chuck Jones

#88. We have big, big problems - flooding, earthquake, and many foolish things which now people are doing - I mean, these self-made catastrophes. We are able to give to every man on the street the possibilities to help himself. And to fight for this was one of my duties.

Frei Otto

#89. I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.

Aleksandar Hemon

#90. Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?

Jean Anouilh

#91. I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.

Geraldine Brooks

#92. Why me?" He said finally. "Are you on some sort of mission to fuck up my life?"
"I try my best to avoid you."
"You're doing a hell of a job."
"I honestly don't mean to cause you problems."
"You don't cause problems. An unpiloted vampire causes problems. You cause catastrophes.

Ilona Andrews

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

Aharon Appelfeld

#94. He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.

Kevin Brockmeier

#95. If I had my way, I would write the word 'insure' over every door of every cottage and upon the blotting pad of every public man, because I am convinced that, for sacrifice that are conceivably small, families can be secured against catastrophes which otherwise would smash them forever.

Winston Churchill

#96. So many hearts broke the day Elsa was born. Shattered with such force by the wave that the shards of the glass were dispersed all around the world. Improbable catastrophes produce improbable things in people, improbable sorrow and improbable heroism.

Fredrik Backman

#97. We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss. This language is laden with future catastrophes. The day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.

Gershom Scholem

#98. It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn't hit you, the slumlord you hadn't offended, the malaria you hadn't caught.

Katherine Boo

#99. Diplomacy, if conducted sensibly, is a matter of small gains offset by small losses, an attempt to maintain a state of equilibrium in which catastrophes are either mitigated or, with luck, avoided entirely.

William S. Maltby

#100. Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.

Orhan Pamuk