Quotes About Catastrophe

If a catastrophic event wipes out a large portion of House members, America needs to know this body, elected by the people, will be quickly and legally reconstituted and will continue to function.

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

By isolating the issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, climate change, environment, governance, economics, catastrophe and whatever other problems the present embodies or the future may bring, science fiction can do what Dickens and Sinclair did: make real the consequences of social injustice or human folly.

For us, genocide was the gas chamber - what happened in Germany. We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide.

For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.

When you think of the condition the world is in now you sometimes wish that Noah had missed the boat.

Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.

Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

On one hand, I think people are destined for something incredible if we don't wipe ourselves out, but I think we're going to wipe 90 percent of ourselves out.

Near the gates and within two cities there will be scourges the like of which was never seen: famine within plague, people put out by steel, crying to the great immortal God for relief.

We cannot guarantee that a humanitarian catastrophe of the extent of the Holocaust will not happen again. On the contrary, we witness a catalogue of atrocities every day in wars across the globe.

If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

Five and forty steps the sky will burn. Fire approaching the large new city. Instantly a great thin flame will leap, when someone will want to test the Normans.

It is the circuit of the great ruinous deed when the name of the seventh is that of the fifth; when the third, even greater, the warlike stranger will take Paris, nor will Provence save her.

What happens when people cannot trust the institutions that are supposed to protect them? What happens when the fundamental laws that constitute and protect decent behavior crumble? The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door. It is a question still worth asking today.

The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door: It is a questions still worth asking today.

we're living longer, getting taller, and are a push of a finger away from every other person on the planet and yet we do not know how to run ourselves. Maybe we're not supposed to know and when we're finished filling the world with parking lots, muffin shops and Starbucks, our point on Earth is finished and with one big cataclysmic boom we'll be gone.

I'd move to Los Angeles if New Zealand and Australia were swallowed up by a tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in England and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack.

the zombiebrine

What does a bully, a bullet, and a tornado have in common? Their all destructive, they can all kill you.

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.

You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.