Quotes About Disasters

El dolor es inevitable. Está en todas partes. Además del sufrimiento individual y el sufrimiento colectivo como seres humanos, también existe el sufrimiento desencadenado por la naturaleza. Los desastres naturales y no naturales ocurren a diario por todos los rincones del planeta: tsunamis, incendios forestales, hambrunas, guerras.

The same things that lead to disparities in health in this country on a day-to-day basis led to disparities in the impact of Hurricane Katrina.

I didn't realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

A hung jury, however, suggests that any decline was not overwhelming; and, in common with most historians, I believe the empire was still very powerful at the end of the fourth century. Unfortunately, a series of disasters was soon to change things.

These disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We've built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage.

I find it vulgar that people are so fascinated by natural disasters, and we allow footage of young people that are looting because they have no choice because of natural disaster.

I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.

We have the most incompetently worked trade deals ever negotiated probably in the history of the world, and that starts with NAFTA. And now they want to go TPP, one of the great disasters.

News items are excellent for eliciting fear and inculcating phobias. Cult leaders like to tell members about floods, earthquakes, fires, famines, plagues, and wars–as proof that the last days have arrived.

Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on what we heard—the politics, the plane crashes and crimes, the large disasters of the day, which we all use to keep the smaller, more long-term sorrows at bay.

We should not be focusing on quick solutions. The really important concern for policymakers everywhere is to prevent disasters - that is, the outlier events that matter the most.

Marriage is a journey of disasters, only to fall in love all over again, with the person that rescues you each time.

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.

During disasters, you hear a lot of praise for human resilience. And we are a remarkably resilient species. But that's not always good. It seems a great many of us can get used to almost anything, even the steady annihilation of our own habitat.

Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social levelling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival.

And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it's that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.

Looking ahead to coming disasters, ecological and political, we often assume that we are all going to face them together, that what's needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course we are on. But I'm not so sure. Perhaps part of the reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it.

We learn the same lesson over and over again: in highly unequal societies, with deep injustices reliably tracing racial fault lines, disasters don't bring us all together in one fuzzy human family. They take preexisting divides and deepen them further, so the people who were already getting most screwed over before the disaster get extra doses of pain during and after.

It is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.

Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing or ignored factors likely to lead to "unintended consequences," a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters.

i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.

I suffered the usual post–collective experience letdown. Sure, I was relieved. Field school was concluded without any disasters of note, and now I could focus on Emma's skeleton. But the students' departure also left me feeling dismally empty. The kids could be exasperating, no question. The unending hubbub. The clowning. The inattention. But my students were also energizing, bursting with enthusiasm, and lousy with youth.

To ward off these disasters, they spent a whole lot of time trying to keep their gods happy via a number of complex rituals, many involving copious amounts of sex ("the gods wish us to have sex" is the oldest pickup line in the world).

One of the problems of prevention is that you rarely know about the disasters you averted.