Quotes About Disaster

Confidence without clarity is always a disaster.

One could say that everybody in this world has a spiritual teacher. For most people, their losses and disasters represent the teacher; their suffering is the teacher.

Shall I make you a cup of tea? He asked. It was the classic response to crisis practiced throughout these islands—in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. Emotional turmoil, danger, even disaster could be faced with far greater equanimity if the kettle was switched on. War has been declared! There's been a major earthquake! The stock market has collapsed! Oh really? Let me put the kettle on….

His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.

good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant. The borderline between good fortune and disaster, between plenitude and paucity, between the warm hearth of love and the cold chamber of loneliness, was a narrow one. We could cross over from one to the other at any moment, as when we stumbled or fell, or simply walked over to the other side because we were paying insufficient attention to where we were.

The way to leave this life, I always say: some sudden, cataclysmic disaster and whoosh, you're propelled into the next world—or oblivion. One might take one's pick.

Political scandals, economic disaster, suffering in all its familiar forms—these were the daily staple of a disaster-prone, uneasy planet.

The alternative to discipline is disaster. VANCE HAVNER

It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.

It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.

To lead or attempt to lead without first having a knowledge of self is foolhardy and is sure to bring disaster and defeat.

kinetic round would bring massive death and destruction to Turlock,

The family that moved into a house and sound out several days later, in the worst way you can imagine, that their sewer line said nothing hooked up. True. And the crane did fall on the house, it was a town house, and the owners don't aren't in. True. And don't forget the house they had to knock down and start over. True.

It's not a mid-life crisis. It's a mid-life disaster. A mid-life crisis is when you wake up with everything and you go "I have everything but I'm still unhappy."

A great disaster is a symbol to us to remember all the big things of life and forget the small things, of which we have thought too much.

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory. —Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 1952

If we don't change, millions of American families are just one medical emergency, or one layoff, away from financial disaster and bankruptcy.

Most citizens today cannot imagine such a possibility because they are psychologically affected by a phenomenon known as normalcy bias, whereby people fail to recognize or underestimate the possibility of disaster. Most people tend to believe that whatever they experience on a day-to-day basis is 'normal' and that things will stay that way.

The fire was barely fifteen minutes old. What followed was a series of fatal errors that set the fire free and doomed the city to a fiery death.

a single tongue of flame shooting out the side of the O'Learys' barn. (Where the fire started)

A DANGEROUS COMBINATION As the epigraph to this chapter indicates, most people don't know whether they are engaging in inherent- or created-risk activities. Couple this with people's failure to distinguish between the two types of loss-producing events, continuous and discrete, introduced at the end of the last chapter, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.

Popular Mechanics article entitled "What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447

But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.