Quotes About Disasters

These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People

Our generation was supposed to be about trying to deal with nuclear concerns and environmental disasters.

Britains [sic], up to now afflicted by various disasters and vicissitudes, were widely reduced to the rule of the Saxons.

There have been as many disasters as there have been successes. What usually goes wrong is not anything technical. It's my misunderstanding of my clientele's basic trust for me. We did a pig's-ear salad that I found delightful and provocative, but it was a loser.

At the moment, world hunger and starvation have everything to do with politics. Political conflicts, insufficient responses to natural disasters, corrupt political institutions, and inequalities in income and education constitute what public health practitioners call the 'root' causes of hunger and malnutrition.

I personally feel very strongly that what it will take is not more disasters, it's that what it will take is a vision of the future that is better than our present.

These early decisions can foreclose many opportunities to reshape the patterns of development in a community so as to make it better and safer by reducing vulnerability to future disasters.

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.

Thus the Turks also regard us as damned because of the disasters and troubles we endure. But they promise themselves eternal happiness because they flourish in this life with wealth and power. This is the Egyptian philosophy and the Turkish religion. The Christian doctrine refutes it, as is taught elsewhere.

The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters.

Forgiveness comes later in life, after you've created enough disasters of your own.

Disasters have no mercy hours where they stop visiting the people; for them, all hours are favourite and legitimate to visit!

Humanity must have a speed of advance higher than the speed of advance of cosmic disasters or big global catastrophes!

There is one thing we must appreciate about the disasters: They are perfectly just when they do their jobs!

I've overseen over 150 presidentially declared disasters. I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it.

I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact one state emergency manager told me, "It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management."827

Historians who carefully examined the events and details behind the disasters of the Titanic, the Challenger, and the Bay of Pigs have determined a common thread: the inability or unwillingness of participants and leaders to raise questions about their concerns. Some group members were fearful that they were the only one who had a particular concern (when, in fact, it was later discovered that many people in the group had similar concerns).

Human nature never changes. Therefore, the stock market never changes. Only the faces, the pockets, the suckers, and the manipulators, the wars, the disasters and the technologies change. The market itself never changes. How can it? Human nature never changes, and human nature runs the market—not reason, not economics, and certainly not logic. It is our human emotions that drive the market, as they do most other things on this planet. —Jesse Livermore (1940)

Mindless punishment and super-incarceration have been societal disasters: locking away tens of thousands of young people in hyper-violent prisons, dominated by institutionalized race wars, without any semblance of education, rehabilitation or hope. The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street.

We tend to think of environmental catastrophes—such as the recent Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in the Bay of Alaska—as "accidents": isolated phenomena that erupt without notice or warning. But when does the word accident become inappropriate? When are such occurrences inevitable rather than accidental? And when does a consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?

For this is the heart of the matter: disasters occur where accidents meet character.

Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods—much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough—became the content of what people called "the news of the day.

Natural disasters devastate a region less effectively than the alliance of greed and technology.

Have some faith in your government," Barnes told her. "We march stupidly into countries we don't understand; we sit back as our cities are decimated by natural disasters; and we let our schools go quietly to shit—despite these things, one thing we're pretty good at is finding people who don't want to be found.