Quotes About Disasters

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

Disasters, my dear Winters, are like public omnibuses," Vale said sententiously. "They come in multiples rather than singly, are inevitably overloaded when they arrive, and stay far too long in any one spot.

The birth of the 20th century was like a flaming sunrise. More was expected of the century than any other. So much had been achieved in the previous one that it seemed sensible to expect that henceforth the world's triumphs would far outweigh the disasters.

Many of the most interesting phenomena that we have touched upon fall into this category, including the occurrence of disasters such as earthquakes, financial market crashes, and forest fires. All of these have fat-tail distributions with many more rare events, such as enormous earthquakes, large market crashes, and raging forest fires, than would have been predicted by assuming that they were random events following a classic Gaussian distribution.

In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.

Sociologists say that forty percent of Chileans suffer from depression, especially women, who have to put up with the men. You must remember, too, that our country goes through major disasters, and that there are many poor, so it seems rude to mention one's own good fortune.

During the years he spent in Venezuela he thought he had once and for all overcome the solemnity that had been an essential part of his nature from childhood, as though he was in mourning for all the world's suffering, violence and evil. Faced with so many disasters, happiness seemed to him obscene. In love with Roser in the green, warm country of Venezuela, he had vanquished the temptation to cloak himself in sadness.

One of the most tenacious myths of modern military history is that of German military omnicompetence. Even the staunchest critics prefer to believe that military disasters happen by design, rather than to imagine that structural dysfunction, or just plain mistakes, could have riddled the premier institution of the Kaiserreich. But that was precisely what was so embarrassing about the war in SWA: it displayed German military incompetence.

The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

I have never moved away from my mainstay - trying to address all the environmental issues that come to me. I consult with law firms in the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Italy, Greece, and India to begin to address environmental disasters. I do motivational speaking.

Joe Public never took long to move to the next news sensation. Downed airliners, earthquakes in China, tsunamis killing tens of thousands, or myriad of disasters that trotted across the news bulletins regularly, all of them were always replaced by the next big headline.

He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens.

tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.

Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.

Noble Savage. Positive or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.

The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness.

We cannot institutionalize helping the victims of personal disasters.

gamble in a wartime prison camp should serve as an example to the staff of the World Bank today. We'll discover what the disasters at Three Mile Island and Deepwater Horizon have to tell us about preventing another Lehman Brothers crisis. We'll learn from a watchmaker

Martin also reveals the many scientific studies that have shown the benefits of long sleeping and napping to our health and happiness, and also shows how major disasters such as Chernobyl, and smaller ones such as train and motorway crashes, were caused by lack of sleep. Chasing profit leads to lack of sleep, and lack of sleep can lead to death.

elated, perhaps, because, in a rational world where even disasters are familiar and damn near routine, something of almost fairytale flavor had occurred?

Everyone had a fudoki, Small Cat knew now. Everyone had their own stories, and the stories of their families and ancestors. There were adventures and love stories, or tricks and jokes and funny things that had happened or disasters. Everyone wanted to tell the stories, and to know where they fit in their own fudokis. She was not that different.

The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good.... If God can take the greatest of evils and turn them for the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well.

There are two big forces at work, external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness, and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control.