Catastrophe Quotes - Page 11

• Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come. I think people in the mass media, journalists, film makers and others, you can contribute to the collective awakening if you are awake and then your life will embody that awakening.

  Nhat Hanh

  Thinking, Media, People

  "The role of journalists and corporates in combating climate change" by Jo Confino, www.theguardian.com. August 26, 2010.

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• A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly.

  Max Hastings

  Government, Decent, Mandates

  "My vote". www.theguardian.com. April 10, 2010.

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• You will find that free advice about your money is always available. It's usually those who lean back and give you the most 'positive' advice whose finances are bordering on catastrophe. They are often wrong, but never in doubt.

  Venita VanCaspel

  Money, Giving, Advice

  Venita VanCaspel (1983). “The power of money dynamics”, Simon & Schuster

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• It was my view that the catastrophe. . . . could have been avoided if Vasilevsky had taken the position he should have. He could have taken a different position. . . . but he didn't do that, and as a result, in my view, he had a hand in the destruction of thousands of Red Army fighters in the Kharkov campaign.

  Aleksandr Vasilevsky

  Taken, Army, Views

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• These days, everything is magnified very quickly by the media - the slightest slip can turn into a catastrophe.

  Valerie Trierweiler

  Media, These Days, Turns

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• I've never been a fan of personality-conflict burgers and identity-crisis omelets with patchouli oil. I function very well on a diet that consists of Chicken Catastrophe and Eggs Overwhelming and a tall, cool Janitor-in-a-Drum. I like to walk out of a restaurant with enough gas to open a Mobil station.

  Tom Waits

  Eggs, Oil, Personality

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• someone had tried to warn me of the kind of catastrophe that is likely to occur when you involve yourself too closely in one of those destinies that is ringed around by the transient tinsel of human applause.

  Mary Deasy

  Destiny, Kind, Fame

  Mary Deasy (1955). “The Boy who Made Good”

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• True nonattachment is understanding that you are fundamentally attached to everything and, through that understanding, dropping your attachment to the view that you are detached from that which you encounter. At the same time, real nonattachment means not clinging to things or people. It means dropping the idea that if you don't have this or if you can't get that, your life will be a catastrophe.

  Brad Warner

  Life, Time, Real

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• I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

  Janette Turner Hospital

  People, Secret, Resilience

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• But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Dream, Science, Venus

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.216, W. W. Norton & Company

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• There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships or missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time. We've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  War, Down And, Way

  "Starship Troopers". Book by Robert A. Heinlein, 1959.

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• I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe - what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in thetreatent, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing.

  Lance Armstrong

  Believe, Long, Shining

  "It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life". Book by Lance Armstrong and Sally Jenkins, May 22, 2000.

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• Marrying any man is risky. Marrying a famous man is kissing catastrophe.

  John Colton

  Marriage, Kissing, Men

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• Ill never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

  Cedric Richmond

  Men, Tragedy, Hurricanes

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• Expectations are usually predicated on the idea that the everyday things that happen to ordinary people shouldn't happen to you. People hold the idea of being ordinary in absolute contempt, so when they face an illness, poverty, or any kind of catastrophe, they say, 'I can't believe this happened to me.' And who did you think it was going to happen to - the woman across the street?

  Caroline Myss

  Believe, Thinking, Everyday Things

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• Pending catastrophe is not an easy notion to entertain, much less sustain. Americans, moreover, have a low tolerance for doom and gloom. We are the nation of optimism, after all. We elect leaders who promise hope and change. We are the shining city on a hill. But what happens when the lights go out?

  Kathleen Parker

  Money, Doom And Gloom, Light

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• We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. ... We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe - and would benefit the vast majority - are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

  Naomi Klein

  Media, Giving, Political

  "This Changes Everything". Book by Naomi Klein, 2014.

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• Why is Netanyahu pushing war? Among several reasons, demonizing Iran reduces pressure on Israel to negotiate seriously with the Palestinians. Many Israelis prefer building Jewish settlements on Palestinians' land instead. Moreover, Israel's rulers oppose any development-such as an Iranian-U.S. detente-that could diminish Israel's U.S.-financed hegemony in the region. War with Iran would be a catastrophe all around. Netanyahu and his hawkish American allies-the same people who gave us the disastrous Iraq war and ISIS-must be repudiated.

  Sheldon Richman

  War, Isis, Iran

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• The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.

  Stefan Zweig

  Art, Drama, Fate

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• Today's coastal development along with hurricane amnesia places modern man on a collision course with catastrophe if the lessons of history are ignored.

  Max Mayfield

  Men, Hurricanes, Lessons

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• Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.

  Roland Barthes

  Blow, Men, Class

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

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• The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Mustache, East, Green

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• Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Moving, Assuming, Happened

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• We are heading towards catastrophe. I think the world is going to pieces. I am very pessimistic. Why? Because the world hasn't been punished yet, and the only punishment that could be adequate is the nuclear destruction of the world.

  Elie Wiesel

  Thinking, Punishment, Nuclear

  Elie Wiesel, Robert Franciosi (2002). “Elie Wiesel: Conversations”, p.92, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

  George Santayana

  Winter, Civilization, Long

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Character and opinion in the United States. The genteel tradition at bay. Dewey's naturalistic metaphysics. Philosophical heresy”

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