Quotes About Disaster

Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster.

Events like Hurricane Katrina and the Minnesota bridge collapse suggest a national infrastructure that has suffered from lack of tending.

History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.

I feel like for me to write songs that I would be interested in as a listener, there has to be tension, and there has to be some kind of push and pull between reality and the potential of disaster.

We imagine 'the end' as a world-devastating event, but every time there's a terrible earthquake, a tsunami, an outbreak of disease - that's apocalyptic, on a micro-scale.

The Katrina matter was terrible.

Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.

Nature is the worst terrorist you can imagine.

There isn't a single American city, in my estimation, that has sufficient plans for a nuclear terrorist event.

The president's very right about one thing: When you have a disaster of that scale, whether it be natural or a terrorist attack, there's only one part of our entire government, state or local, that is equipped to handle it, and that's the U.S. military.

Americans rightly asked, if this is the way our government responds to a natural disaster it knew about days in advance, how would it respond to a surprise terrorist attack? How would it respond to an earthquake?

Katrina did much more damage than anything the terrorists could ever put together.

I think I have made allowances for the kind of despair which would test my faith, but you cannot know in advance what disaster to those you love would be too much to bear faithfully, and like everyone's, my faith is weakly conditional in some ways. I hope, I pray not to lose it. My fingers are crossed. Also my heart.

The U.S's first ballistic missile test was a complete disaster. The Atlas Missile Program, which began in the early 1950s, attempted its first ballistic missile launch on June 11, 1957. The rocket flew for 24 seconds before blowing up. It took two more years before the first successfully armed test flight took place.

Till the vessel strikes with a shivering shock—"O Christ! It is the Inchcape Rock."

Catastrophe is change on the fast track. Disaster is a laboratory for adaptability.

Meanwhile I chain-smoked Bali cigarettes, looking at the window at the highway and thinking about the disaster that was my life.

I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster.

Fate rushes down upon us! The time drags and the days plod past, lulling us into thinking that the doom we fear will always so delay. Then, abruptly, the dark days we have all predicted are upon us, and the time when we could have turned dire fate aside has passed. How old must I be before I learn? There is no time; there is never any time. Tomorrow may never come, but todays are linked inexorably in a chain, and now is always the only time we have to divert disaster.

And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster.

The sad thing about boredom is that one learns to value it only when it is exploded by a disaster, or the threat of one.

Fate rushes down upon us! The time drags and the days plod past, lulling us into thinking that the doom we fear will always so delay. Then, abruptly, the dark days we have all predicted are upon us, and the time when we could have turned dire fate aside has passed. How old must I be before I learn? There is no time; there is never any time. Tomorrow may never come, but todays are inexorably linked in a chain, and now is always the only time we have to divert disaster.

Sometimes all a father can do is stand by and witness the disaster, and then pick up the pieces.

Suppression of our natural responses to disaster is part of the disease of our time. The refusal to acknowledge these responses causes a dangerous splitting. It divorces our mental calculations from our intuitive, emotional, and biological embeddedness in the matrix of life. That split allows us passively to acquiesce in the preparations for our own demise.