Quotes About Catastrophe

Even leaving aside government policy, whole industries are already making expensive changes around the perceived need to 'go green.' Al Gore and countless other prophets of global catastrophe are making megamillions pushing these expensive solutions. Schoolchildren around the globe are being frightened by tales of impending calamity.

It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.

One historical study of the epidemic has concluded that 'the sanitary and demographic catastrophe which befell Bosnia in the years 1815–18 had no parallel in other European countries since the Black Death in the years 1347–1351'.

I mean, there's doomed. There's screwed. And there's monsoons-in-Hell fucked. And we're at fucked o'clock.

This might be the end of the world as we know it, but it's still show biz.

They weren't a particularly bright people and disappeared along with their island in a volcanic mishap.

The future is a mess, the past is a wreck, and I'm center stage at the shit storm of the century.

There was no advance warning, no marginal area of incremental damage. The wave had come in with full force, spent itself and stopped at a point as clearly defined as the reach of a high tide. Above it, nothing had been touched; below it, everything was changed.

I am singing now while Rome burns.

Yup. That's when all hell broke loose.

One should not attend even the end of the world without a good breakfast.

We need to have as many baskets for our eggs as possible. Even if we don't manage to ruin this planet ourselves, natural disasters or changes—or even changes in our star—could make it impossible to live on this planet. —Philosopher Anson MacDonald, radio interview, Butler, MO, USA, Terra, July 7, 1987 ("Anson MacDonald Day")

It's possible that a meteor will come hurtling in from outer space and wipe out this whole city." And so on. The neutral and objective view that covered any other experience in Holy Out's life just couldn't reach the area of the first shot; that was permanently buried under everything he had ever read about the causes of deviant behavior.

While the Citadel is building more and more nuclear missiles for the Military-Industrial Empire, it is apt to provoke anxiety or guilt or uneasy sensations in general to think about the subject of Planetary Catastrophe. The people who do think about that are likely to resign from the Citadel — or get expelled, like Dr. Oppenheimer — or even to march around with picket signs, making a nuisance of themselves.

Their position seems to be that if they're going to die then the world must die with them. This is clearly a manifestation of narcissism, and has been named the Götterdämmerung Syndrome.

A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. —Le

Flood, ice age, population boom, social chaos, revolution; perhaps things had gotten so bad that humanity had shifted into some kind of universal catastrophe rescue operation, or, in other words, the first phase of the postcapitalist era.

The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth's history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts.

The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky.

The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of it. Leaving only the jaguars.

causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One

Even a passenger on an airplane falling from the sky can't shake the hope that he'll be the one to survive.

THE END OF civilization as we knew it arrived not with a whimper, but with a massive storm. When

Proverbs is in many respects a work on ethics, presenting arguments concerning the manner in which moral precepts relate to life and the good; Job investigates the reasons good individuals (and, by implication, good nations) should suffer catastrophe; Esther seeks an account of how God's will works in political circumstances in which one sees nothing but the decisions and deeds of human actors; and so forth.