Quotes About Catastrophe

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, Mr. President, but I do say not more than ten to twenty million dead depending upon the breaks.

That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?

It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.

The only way to contain catastrophe is to cordon it off with dates, but the numbers mean nothing. If I think instead of how much dust would have settled on Rich's bureau, then I can feel it. There is nothing like dust.

Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us a single act of injustice--cheating in business, exploitation of the poor--is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.

OH THIS IS A BLACK DAY FOR YOU, YOUNG YOKUM--AND FOR ALL HUMANITY!!!

So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn't ring, he isn't asked out, nothing new happens. For most of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize at last that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly through cowardly inaction.

He considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence.

They say we have we created the man to end all wars; I say we have created a man to end all worlds.

La membrana dell'amore è delicata, basta un graffio accidentale a lacerarla. Se i dubbi di Rìmini l'avevano danneggiata, rendendola vulnerabile all'infezione che, per un innamorato, cova nel desiderio di vivere una vita diversa dalla propria, l'esperienza della catastrofe era bastata a rigenerarla.

THE EXILE AND AFTER This renewed catastrophe was a key event in the history of the people of Israel. Maybe if the exile in Babylon had lasted more than half a century, the impetus to preserve and enhance a Jewish identity might have been lost, but as it was the exiles who returned were able to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem; it was reconsecrated in 516 BCE.

As disquieted as if he were expected to "do something" to avert a catastrophe (as one is expected to do something about an overturned tumbler, the contents of which is about to drip over the edge of the table and into a lady's lap)…

The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.

Elephants can sense danger. They're able to detect an approaching tsunami or earthquake before it hits. Unfortunately, Jack did not have this talent. The day his life was turned completely upside down, he was caught unaware.

A slow-motion train wreck. For something to go this colossally wrong, everything must intersect and collide at the exact right, or in this case, wrong, moment.

And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking--how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe--Pasquale Tursi said, only, "Yes.

modern man is overcome by a profound feeling of powerlessness which makes him gaze toward approaching catastrophes as though he were paralyzed.

government which solves its unemployment problem by building an armament industry has only two possibilities: war or a domestic catastrophe. Therefore war.

Passengers were crushed by descending boats. Swimmers were struck by chairs, boxes, potted plants, and other debris falling from the decks high above. And then there were those most ill-starred of passengers, who had put on their life preservers incorrectly and found themselves floating with their heads submerged, legs up, as in some devil's comedy.

Of the 791 passengers designated by Cunard as missing, only 173 bodies, or about 22 percent, were eventually recovered, leaving 618 souls unaccounted for. The percentage for the crew was even more dismal, owing no doubt to the many deaths in the luggage room when the torpedo exploded.

Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.

One immense German bomb, a thirteen-foot, four-thousand-pounder named Satan, could destroy an entire city block.