Quotes About Catastrophes

We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on us. We are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes that make up daily life.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.

So many catastrophes in love are only accidents of egotism.

In Matthew 24:8, Jesus called these challenges birth pangs. Birth pangs must occur before a new birth. During this time the mother keeps focused on the end result, the moment she gets to hold that beautiful baby in her arms. She knows birth pangs don't last forever and they signal a new beginning in her life. Calamities and catastrophes are the earthly pains that must occur before the birth of the new world. Hold on. Grit your teeth. The next push could be the last.

How can government reduce the frequency and the severity of future catastrophes? Companies that have the potential to create significant harm must be required to pay for the costs they inflict, either before or after the fact. Economists agree on this general approach. The problem is in putting such a policy into effect.

What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.

I shall have spent my life in railway stations Nearly departing For catastrophes, All for love And my heart haloed with the madness of love. Nothing is quite so beautiful as the trains I've missed …

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.

From small mistakes come great catastrophes;

I'd gotten myself into a kind of journalism that wasn't really compatible with rearing an infant. I'd been a foreign correspondent for a long time and had this subspecialty in covering catastrophes. It had spoiled me a little because you have a tremendous amount of autonomy, and I couldn't really see being an editor in an office.

The military has been tremendously important in the past during catastrophes and in protecting the population. But it shouldn't become an auxiliary police force.

Retribution seen in natural catastrophes is manufactured by all too eager and all too pious people, each one convinced the world will end but spare them and them alone. But we all know, the world is inherited by the obnoxious, not the righteous

The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes--most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.

Is what makes you solid a part of you? If the answer is yes, then you are a child of the big bang and a descendant of explosions, collisions, catastrophes, stars, and galaxies. The protons in your hand have been through every slam, every bash, every disaster, and every creative crash this cosmos has ever managed to throw their way. [...] The story of those cosmic calamities and material miracles is your biography. The story of the universe - from protons and suns to curiosity - is your history.

Why me? He said finally. Are you on some sort of mission to fuck up my life? I try my best to avoid you. You're doing a hell of a job. I honestly don't mean to cause you problems. You don't cause problems. An unpiloted vampire causes problems. You cause catastrophes.

You don't cause problems. An unpiloted vampire causes problems. You cause catastrophes.

Karos has said again and again, justice is a conceit. It does not exist in nature. 'Retribution seen in natural catastrophes is manufactured by all too eager and all too pious people, each one convinced the world will end but spare them and them alone. But we all know, the world is inherited by the obnoxious, not the righteous.' Unless, came the thought in Janath's voice, the two are one and the same.

The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophes so that they can exploit them.

Not so very long ago there were medical authorities who did not "believe" in bacteria and consequently allowed twenty thousand young women to die of easily avoidable puerperal fever in Germany alone. The psychic catastrophes caused by the mental inertia of "experts" do not appear in any statistics, and from this it is concluded that they are non-existent.

You don't cause problems. An unpiloted vampire causes problems. You cause catastrophes.

Occasions for appealing to public compassion are never wanting in a nation eternally rocked by catastrophes that shake the foundations of life, floods that sweep away entire towns, gigantic waves that deposit ships in the center of a plaza. We are created in the idea that life is precarious, and we are always waiting for the next calamity to happen.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.