Catastrophe Quotes - Page 19

• Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man's vanity to be loathsome.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Men, Vanity

  "Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs". Book by Hans Arp, p. 315, 1966.

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• I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.

  Cornel West

  Pain, Moving, America

  Cornel West (2009). “Brother West”, p.4, Hay House, Inc

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• If we are to avoid that catastrophe [a nuclear World War III], a system of world order — preferably a system of world government — is mandatory. The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty, just as America's thirteen colonies did two centuries ago. When we finally come to our senses and establish a world executive and parliament of nations, thanks to the Nuremburg precedent we will already have in place the fundamentals for the third branch of government, the judiciary.

  Walter Cronkite

  War, Light, Government

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• There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe.

  Robert Cailliau

  Community, Would Be, Alternatives

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• Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He's eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe.

  Mario Batali

  Fun, Golf, Play

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• To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a set of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.

  Jodi Picoult

  Children, Loss, Keys

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “The Pact: A Love Story”, p.39, Harper Collins

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• The dramatic sufferings of adults and all the cruel fantasies of those of my own age, who seemed abandoned to their own impulses in the midst of so many catastrophes, appeared to inscribe themselves on the walls around me.

  Antoni Tapies

  Wall, Suffering, Age

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• It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

  Masha Gessen

  People, Natural, Opposition

  "Masha Gessen: Propaganda On Russia's Own Shrinking Public Acceptance Space To Talk Of Reality". Interview with Meara Sharma, www.guernicamag.com. February 3, 2014.

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• I would say off the cuff that I am an anxious person. I worry about everything. I need to know everything. I tend to live in a state of anxiety with the feeling that life is some kind of great catastrophe.

  Antoni Tapies

  Worry, Anxiety, Feelings

  "Antoni Tapies". UNESCO Courier, June 1994.

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• We have believing in this innocent feeling of nothing will ever happen to us, because all catastrophes always broad and happening to anyone else.

  Asne Seierstad

  Believe, Feelings, Innocent

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth. Will this happen before our technological civilization disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it forever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos.

  Martin Rees

  Moon, Civilization, Space

  "Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning". Book by Martin Rees, 2003.

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• As long as we are a single-planet species, we are vulnerable to extinction by a planetwide catastrophe, natural or self-induced. Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.

  David Grinspoon

  Moon, Self, Long

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• We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

  Thomas Cahill

  Pain, War, Blessed

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World”, p.3, Anchor

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• Shakespeare very rarely makes the least attempt to surprise by his catastrophes. They are felt to be inevitable, though the precise way in which they will be brought about is not, of course, foreseen.

  Andrew Coyle Bradley

  Way, Surprise, Inevitable

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• It is not women's fault if we are so tender. It is in the nature of the lives we live. And further, it would be a terrible catastrophe if men had to live men's lives and women's also. Which is precisely what has happened today -- to women.

  Selma James

  Women, Would Be, Today

  Selma James (1983). “The ladies and the mammies: Jane Austen & Jean Rhys”, Falling Wall Pr

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• If the sexual revolution has been a medical disaster, socially it has been a catastrophe. Why do the media not report and explore the tragic results of the sexual revolution? Because many are collaborators.

  Pat Buchanan

  Media, Revolution, Medical

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• Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi grabbed full power for himself. Not even the pharaohs had so much authority, to say nothing of his predecessor Hosni Mubarak. This is a catastrophe - it a mockery of the revolution that brought him to power and an act that leads one to fear the worst.

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  President, Revolution, Egyptian

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• As for the role of France and Germany: French politics is often more self-confident then German politics due to the catastrophe in the first half of the last century. If Berlin and Paris don't agree, then it is difficult to make progress in Europe.

  Wolfgang Schauble

  Self, Europe, Paris

  "Q &A with Wolfgang Schäuble". Interview with Derek Scally, www.irishtimes.com. August 24, 2012.

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• We could not wipe ourselves out with a nuclear war. I do not want so sound too positive. It would be a catastrophe, but it would not be a final one. We are not powerful enough for that. An asteroid could be that powerful. That is why we need to do our homework.

  Rusty Schweickart

  Powerful, War, Would Be

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• On Syria, it's clear that the indiscriminate attacks on civilians by the [Bashar] Assad regime and Russia will only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe and that a negotiated end to the conflict is the only way to achieve lasting peace in Syria.

  Barack Obama

  Russia, Way, Conflict

  Source: time.com

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• . . . since being a Jew not only means that I bear within me a catastrophe that occurred yesterday and cannot be ruled out for tomorrow, it is-beyond being a duty-also fear. Every morning when I get up I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm, something that touches the deepest and most closely intertwined roots of my existence; indeed I am not even sure if this is not my entire existence. Then I feel approximately as I did back then when I got a taste of the first blow from a policeman's fist. Every day anew I lose my trust in the world.

  Jean Amery

  Morning, Mean, Blow

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• Whenever calamity howlers shake their heads and impress upon you that this, that, and the next dire catastrophe is to befall this nation or the nations of the world-such as, for example, that exhaustion of the world's oil supply will bring all transportation and machinery to a standstill through lack of lubrication, or that exhaustion of the earth's stores of coal will make life unlivable in these cold climates-just smile and reply that the worst troubles of all are those that never happen [and] that you prefer not to cross shaky bridges until you come to them.

  B. C. Forbes

  Bridges, Oil, Next

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• Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe.

  Carl Sagan

  War, Nuclear, Fool

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• We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Nature, Animal, Diversity

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• The use of a mere dozen nuclear weapons ... would be a human catastrophe without parallel. ... Because so few weapons can kill so many people, even far-reaching disarmament proposals would leave us implicated in plans for unprecedented slaughter of innocent people. The sole measure that can free us from this burden is abolition.

  Jonathan Schell

  People, Would Be, Nuclear

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