Quotes About Catastrophe

I think of dystopian as 'Mad Max,' as 'Book of Eli,' as the world is ending.

Israeli independence - what we Arabs call al-Naqba, 'The Catastrophe' - it created Palestinian identity more than anything else.

In the first instant of seeing, of knowing, Catell heard the terrible sounds of everything that breaks, bursts, and rips apart beyond repair, and the mad turning of all that moves, speeds, dashes about for a while, turning like a giant wheel, around, around. Then the wheel stopped.

Catell reached forward, lunging and the world jarred with a screeching searing flame of red that weaved, burst, and then sank sharply into itself, leaving nothing but a total dead black.

with the basic tenet of Marxism: where there was contemplation, there should now be mobilization. The abiding catastrophe of now-impure theory began with the introduction of militancy before the March 1848 revolution and its presupposition of civil war in philosophy.

As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it cant be done.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

Simple really, the only future I see before me is one of mass famine, severe droughts, wildfires and floods.

Derrida believes that the "triumph" of capitalism in the West has only served to highlight its own failures, as human suffering continues and environmental catastrophe appears inevitable. Western economic systems have only exacerbated the plagues of underemployment, foreign debt, arms trade, and inter-ethnic violence.4

they had thrived on Earth for millions of years, but their own waste killed them.

miscalculation of tragic proportions,

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO2 reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

Unflinching creeds and consuming worldviews could lead to catastrophe, for devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts. He

I understood why parents would want to do that, but it wasn't the message I was going for. If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming. Justine's crime had been a badly worded joke mocking privilege. To see the catastrophe as her fault felt to me a little like 'Don't wear short skirts'. It felt like victim-blaming.

She saw a planet on which there were still seventeen thousand nukes, probably enough to wipe vertebrate life off the face of it, and thought This can't be good.

How terribly easy it had turned out to be to transform naturally occurring uranium into hollow spheres of plutonium, pack the spheres with tritium and surround them with explosives and deuterium, and do it all in such miniature that the capacity to incinerate a million people could fit on the bed of Cody Flayner's pickup.

His family feared he might one day succumb to the catastrophe of being a poet.

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.

In 1883, an earthquake that lasted ninety seconds shook the south of Italy. In that earthquake, he lost his parents and his sister; he himself was buried by rubble. Two or three hours later, he was rescued. To ward off total despair, he resolved to think about the Universe - a general procedure among the unfortunate, and sometimes a balm.

Ma mère sait se sortir du pétrin. Ma mère fait ce qu'il y a à faire. Elle est une preuve que la vie fonctionne, même après une catastrophe.