Quotes About Catastrophe

Here in our solar system, a hundred-meter-wide asteroid sails into Earth every millennium or so at speeds upward of fifty thousand miles an hour, generating a destructive impact equal to 2,500 atomic bombs.

Meteor Crater A 150-foot-wide metallic meteor struck the Mogollon Rim in modern-day Arizona 50,000 years ago, leaving a mile-wide hole that's 60 stories deep.

But better to imagine the worst than to experience it.

Women, I've noticed, are easily distracted by clothing stores, and I was certain that the ladies on the Titanic stopped at the ship's apparel shop for the Half-Price Sinking Sale on their way to the lifeboats.

To date, around 99.9 percent of all species ever to have inhabited Earth have become extinct.

The decision to go into the mountains and hike with your dog, and wingsuit with the dog, can bring catastrophe. These are decisions we make because they fulfill us, but they also have danger.

At that catastrophic moment, the first two people ever created died in spirit, became sickened in body and soul, experienced a crippling sense of shame, and disconnected from each other and God. Life on earth went from being heavenly to being hellish.

to bring about the downfall of

For kilometres on end the road was totally jammed with vehicles drawn up three or four abreast - petrol tankers, ammunition trucks, teams of horses,ambulances. It was impossible to move forwards or back. Russian combat aircraft now arrived in wave after wave, and threw bombs into that unprotected, inextricable mass. This is what hell must be like.

if he had said otherwise. To admit that a thermonuclear catastrophe would be the end of civilization and of the biosphere would be, in religious terms, profane and defeatist. All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and

Splendid. I believe we've achieved a whole new level of doomed.

You worry about a crack in the floor while the whole mountain is about to come down on us!

If anyone here is alive," he called out again, "groan or make some sound and we'll take you out." He looked around the auditorium, taking in the burned seats, the blackened walls, the twisted piles of debris on the stage, and the smoldering bodies of the dead. But the devastated Iroquois Theater was silent.

Haven't you grasped the significance of this discovery? In the Telluric Navel you place the most powerful valve, which enables you to foresee rain and drought, to release hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes, to split continents, sink islands (no doubt Atlantis disappeared in some such reckless experiment), raise mountain chains …You realize the atomic bomb is nothing in comparison? Besides

Man is at the mercy of events. Life is a perpetual succession of events, and we must submit to it. We never know from what quarter the sudden blow of chance will come. Catastrophe and good fortune come upon us and then depart, like unexpected visitors. They have their own laws, their own orbits, their own gravitational force, all independent of man.

Catastrophes have a somber way of arranging things.

Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.

this spectre encountered the rich man in all his glory; but they did not look at each other, they passed on. This condition of things could thus last for some time. The moment this man perceives that this woman exists, while this woman does not see that this man is there, the catastrophe is inevitable.

When adversity entered his room, he bowed to his old acquaintance cordially; he tickled catastrophe in the ribs.

How often it happens, that, when a catastrophe occurs, if we inquire into the cause we find it originated through the obstinacy of one with little ability, but having full faith in his own powers.

That spring, rain fell in great sweeping gusts that rattled the rooftops. Water found its way into the smallest cracks and undermined the sturdiest foundations. Chunks of land that had been steady for generations fell like slag heaps on the roads below, taking houses and cars and swimming pools down with them.

Hiroshima. There are a million ways for this sick, corrupt world to end.

The lights are going out all over Europe; We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. —SIR EDWARD GREY, ON WORLD WAR

I'm not one of those famous people flying round the world emoting over every catastrophe. I'm too feeble.