Quotes About Catastrophes

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.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment.

Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.

The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seems unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world's leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes.

The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic's Catastrophes.

catastrophes in his kitchen, too. And he hadn't even blamed her when

These days, it's really been uninteresting except when disasters occur.

of expectation, that the ordinary pressures, worries, and temptations of life in an open society are serial catastrophes for which the only remedy is the abandonment of their own freedoms.

O, I have known metallic paradisesWhere cuckoos clucked to finchesAbove the deft catastrophes of drums.While titters hailed the groans of deathBeneath gyrating awnings I have seenThe incunabula of the divine grotesque.

I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.

Dead human beings provided retrospective arguments for the rectitude of policy. Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory.

One of the things government should be around for is to deal with catastrophes. It should do that well. To me, that's a government function, and we shouldn't be playing political games with it.

Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn't true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love.

There are gods and catastrophes.

So many catastrophes in love are only accidents of egotism.

If the Emperor strayed from the path of virtue, All Under Heaven would fall into chaos. Even natural catastrophes might signify that disharmony had beset the universe. The existing dynasty would be seen to have lost the "Mandate of Heaven" by which it possessed the right to govern: rebellions would break out, and a new dynasty would restore the Great Harmony of the universe.19

In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

The first days of war were the first days of disgrace. After a series of partial catastrophes, in the spring of 1915 came the general retreat. The generals took out their own criminal incapacity on the peaceful population. Enormous tracts of land were violently laid waste. Clouds of human locusts were driven to the rear with whips. The external rout was completed with an internal one.

All liberation affects Good and Evil equally. The liberation of morals and minds entails crimes and catastrophes. The liberation of law and pleasure leads inevitably to the liberation of crime.

It is in the sphere of the media that we most clearly see the event short-circuited by its immediate image-feedback. Information, news coverage, is always already there. When there are catastrophes, the reporters and photojournalists are there before the emergency services. If they could be, they would be there before the catastrophe, the best thing being to invent or cause the event so as to be first with the news.

An anxious expression spread over his face as he thought to himself that the time was coming when he would have to give up this comfort, and then that comfort, until God knew what would be the end of it all. In this way he was an imaginative man, and when these fits of foreboding overcame him he genuinely forgot that only a succession of highly improbable catastrophes could reduce him to the penury he so feared.

Les agrocarburants provoquent des catastrophes sociales et climatiques. Ils réduisent les terres vivrières, détruisent l'agriculture familiale et contribuent à aggraver la faim dans le monde. Leur production s'accompagne du rejet dans l'atmosphère du dioxyde de carbone en grande quantité et absorbe un volume élevé d'eau potable. (p. 306)

Things aren't that simple," said Tiffany. "They are if we want them to be," said Vid. He swept up the final shards of glass and stood. "You're getting yourself all worked up over nothing. You're finding catastrophes.

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all–no one's around to write horror stories.