Quotes About Disaster

Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors and abdicates its responsibility altogether. —Harry Belafonte, American musician and civil rights activist, September 20052

President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke out strongly against war profiteers, saying, "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.

In New Orleans after Katrina, some of the key players who now surround Trump showed to what lengths they will go to decimate the public sphere and advance the interests of real estate developers, private contractors, and oil companies.

It's impossible to say how much the decision to use the tsunami as an opportunity for disaster capitalism contributed to the return to civil war.

Estos ataques organizados contra las instituciones y bienes públicos, siempre después de acontecimientos de carácter catastrófico, declarándolos al mismo tiempo atractivas oportunidades de mercado, reciben un nombre en este libro: «capitalismo del desastre».

And with policymakers still locked in the vise grip of austerity logic, these rising emergency expenditures are being offset with cuts to everyday public spending, which will make societies even more vulnerable during the next disaster—a classic vicious cycle.

Finding new ways to privatize the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do; left to its own devices, it is capable of nothing else.

Honoring the dead begins with telling the truth. And the truth is that there is nothing natural about this disaster [Hurricane Maria]. And if you believe in God, leave her out of this too.

We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the other fundamentally reshape us.

Los capitalistas del desastre comparten la misma incapacidad de distinguir entre destrucción y creación, entre dolor y recuperación.

Superstorm Sandy, meanwhile, has been a windfall for New Jersey real estate developers who have received millions for new construction in lightly damaged areas, while it continues to be a nightmare for those living in hard-hit public housing, much as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina played out in New Orleans.10

we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous, since they imply that there is an acceptable price for allowing entire countries to disappear, for leaving untold millions to die on parched land

And so does pity lead straight to disaster.

Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.

During times of disaster sorrow brings people together in a spirit of friendship, and influences man to recognize the blessings of becoming his brother's keeper.

ON MY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY, I SPAWNED THE MOST ILL-FATED idea that had ever occurred to me. Without consulting anybody, I decided to host a birthday party and invite Barceló, Bernarda, and Clara. In my father's estimation, the whole thing was a recipe for disaster.

Afterward the Captain was to tell himself that in this one instant he knew everything. Actually, in a moment when a great but unknown shock is expected, the mind instinctively prepares itself by abandoning momentarily the faculty of surprise. In that vulnerable instant a kaleidoscope of half-guessed possibilities project themselves, and when the disaster has defined itself there is the feeling of having understood beforehand in some supernatural way.

Today, the rich bottom land of the Misssissippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help.

You can't do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or Boy Meets Girl way.

As a foreigner, I used to think all of Michigan was a post-apocalyptic wasteland of burning buildings, trashed cars, abandoned factories and broken dreams. But now I know that's just Detroit. It's only the Democrat-controlled areas that are a disaster.

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

I would argue that electing Donald Trump would be a disaster for minorities; it would be a disaster when it comes to foreign policy.

Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. Ludwig von Mises