Quotes About Catastrophe

The worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm, a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters.

A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.

THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland.

We were not realizing that, with just a machete, you can do a genocide.

No man could have accepted me because I am too rebellious. It would have been catastrophe. I am too into my own thing.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

To reduce the risk of a global environmental catastrophe, and to avoid reversing the course of human progress, the world must urgently bend the curve of global emissions away from fossil fuels.

We find ourselves heading fully into an era of mass extinction.

Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

Ambiciones irritantemente desproporcionadas, proyectos nobles, ideales resplandecientes se convierten en catástrofe: el socialismo mesiánico engendra el gulag.

We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss. This language is laden with future catastrophes. The day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.

A World Cup without Argentina and without Messi would be a catastrophe.

We are in the midst of a momentous catastrophe of world history, of a transformation of all aspects of life and of the entire inner human being This is perhaps fortunate for the artistic person, if he is strong enough to bear the consequences, because what we need is the courage to have inner experience.

Don't you think you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related.

The physical and emotional qualifications to survive an apocalypse are naturally equalizing.

There's not supposed to be anything left after the end of the world, even if the end of the world doesn't quite happen.

Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don't you?

In the glass burrow beneath their feet, the flames began to rise. First the flames, and then the screams

The Doomsday weight-loss plan kicks ass.

What I thought was a sea of dust is an ocean of death.

Anxiety," he wrote, "is apprehension about future suffering—the fearful anticipation of an unbearable catastrophe one is hopeless to prevent." For Dr. W., the defining signature of anxiety, and what makes it more than a pure animal instinct, is its orientation toward the future.

When she awoke, the world was on fire.

The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's thunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction.