Quotes About Catastrophe

Chicxulub crater.

Later, as his [Cuvier's] list of extinct species grew, his position changed. There had, he decided, been multiple cataclysms. "Life on earth has often been disturbed by terrible events," he wrote. "Living organisms without number have been victims of these catastrophes.

After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason "impact winter.

los neandertales siguieron el destino del Megatherium, el mastodonte americano, y de tantos otros desafortunados miembros de la megafauna. En otras palabras, tal como me lo expresó un investigador, «su mala suerte fuimos nosotros».

Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five.

ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated.

Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed

By the winter of 1916, German civilians were starving, even starving to death. Unless the war ended very soon, Germany faced catastrophe even if not a single Allied soldier advanced another step.

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.

The media that's having this hysterical reaction to James Mattis retiring is the same media in many cases, the same politicians in many cases, who cheered our nation into a war in Iraq that turned out to be a catastrophe.

What happened was a terrible, beautiful collapse.

There is evidence that we are headed into what would be the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's hard to know for sure if you're in one because a mass extinction is an event where over 75 percent of the species on the planet die out over a - usually about a million-year period. The fastest it might happen is in hundreds of thousands of years.

I was caught on the freeway for hours when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The entire city had to be evacuated. I observed lives threatened by catastrophes and a whole range of behaviour. What could people do during a crisis?

Si hay algo para lo que resulte útil una formación literaria, es para dotarlo a uno de un sentido de la catástrofe. No hay nada como una imaginación vivida para desvitalizarle a uno el valor.

12 Divine Retribution and National Catastrophe Jahweh's wrath and the humiliation and destruction of the people that incurs it constitute an often repeated theme in the Biblical books. Usually the national catastrophe comes about through a violent attack by some neighboring people, especially selected as Jahweh's scourge and whip. To this theme the historiographic document

Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions.

Tenochtitlán, the once-magnificent, fell to Cortés. It lay, a heap of ruins, a charnel-house containing thousands of unburied corpses. Its overthrow was a masterpiece of military genius, valor, and enterprise. Everyone knew that it would take its place among immortal deeds of arms and felt proud to have had a share in it. Too bad that the once-glittering Valley with its palaces, gardens, cities, and temples had been laid waste, but such was war.

Sometimes, the decisions have to be taken in minutes, even seconds, and there would be no time to make the right decision. We understood that this could have ended in catastrophe.

Once the door to one disaster had opened, the possibilities for catastrophe seemed open-ended and I felt I'd no choice but to go along with my life as it unraveled.

The apocalypse doesn't have to be fire and brimstone. It could happen on a personal level. If you believe you're the center of your own universe and you want to see the universe destroyed, it only takes one bullet.

Why must we be left, the survivors picking among the flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable?

Etymologically, a disaster is a bad star.

I do believe that we stand at a threshold, as Bonhoeffer did, and that the example of his life obliges me to speak about the gravity of our historical moment as I see it, in the knowledge that no society is at any time immune to moral catastrophe.

The mind does its best to lessen the impact of any catastrophe. It really tries its best. But then the distance between reality and woven fantasy becomes too great for even the mind to bear. All those words of calm and relief, the hope that everything will be all right in the end, can't help stretching and tearing and fading to nothing. Then you wake up screaming.