Catastrophe Quotes - Page 5

• The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.

  Jared Diamond

  Agriculture, Adoption, Way

  "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" by Jared Diamond, discovermagazine.com. May 01, 1999.

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• The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

  Gao Xingjian

  War, Moving, Europe

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• The American capitalists are richer and stronger than their counterparts in other lands. They are also younger and more ignorant, and therefore more inclined to seek a rough settlement of difficulties without diplomatic subtlety and finesse. All that does not change the fact that American capitalism operates according to the same laws as the others, is confronted with the same fundamental problems, and is headed toward the same catastrophe.

  James P. Cannon

  Law, Land, Ignorant

  "Fascism and The Workers’ Movement". The Militant, www.marxists.org. March-April 1954.

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• Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Thinking, Hands, Years

  "Mapping Ideology" by Slavoj Žižek, p.1, 1994.

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• When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Political, Honor, Progress

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• I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

  Michael Lewis

  Might, Stuck, Ifs

  Michael Lewis (2015). “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (movie tie-in)”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The purely material world seems to have more in common than we with the unchanging and everlasting years of the Great Creator. Yet we know that it is not so. In reality the rocks are less enduring than man. Each man's personal self will still survive for weal or woe, when another catastrophe shall have utterly changed the surface of this planet, and the elements shall have melted with fervent heat, and the earth also and all things that are therein shall have been burnt up.

  Henry Parry Liddon

  Reality, Men, Rocks

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• Unfortunately, catastrophes or scandalous disclosures always have to happen before humanity realises that it is only its own mistakes that have led it into misfortune. These are all the more difficult to rectify, because in the main they have been made by the authorities, who will not commit suicide themselves, but in order to save their own skins, they would rather that all Life should perish before they acknowledge their errors.

  Viktor Schauberger

  Suicide, Mistake, Errors

  Viktor Schauberger, Callum Coats (2000). “The Fertile Earth – Nature's Energies in Agriculture, Soil Fertilisation and Forestry: Volume 3 of Renowned Environmentalist Viktor Schauberger’s Eco-Technology Series”, p.108, Gill & Macmillan Ltd

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• As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

  James Payn

  Mistake, Writing, Men

  James Payn (1882). “Sammlung”

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• Famine was quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system where they are divorced from personal ownership of the land and obligated to work on the conditions which the state may demand from them... This famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe or such complete exhaustions of the country's resources in foreign and civil wars.

  William Henry Chamberlin

  Country, War, Mean

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• The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.

  Philip Johnson

  Cities, Architecture, Automobile

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• This was truly guerilla filmmaking. We shot out in the middle of nowhere in a place called Delta Flats, where basically every day was some new minor catastrophe.

  Jeri Ryan

  Movie, New Day, Actors

  Interview with Chris Neumer, www.stumpedmagazine.com.

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• When you wake up each morning, you can choose to be happy or choose to be sad. Unless some terrible catastrophe has occurred the night before, it is pretty much up to you. Tomorrow morning, when the sun shines through your window, choose to make it a happy day.

  Lynda Resnick

  Morning, Night, Shining

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• Plant diseases, drought, desolation, despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages - and the ancient remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.

  Norman Borlaug

  Despair, Age, Disease

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• But space travel can't ease the pressure on a planet grown too crowded not even with today's ships and probably not with any future ships-because stupid people won't leave the slopes of their home volcano even when it starts to smoke and rumble. What space travel does do is drain off the best brains: those smart enough to see a catastrophe before it happens, and with the guts to pay the price-abandon home, wealth, friends, relatives, everything-and go. That's a tiny fraction of one percent. But that's enough.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Smart, Stupid, Home

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• I was asked the other day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but I think that for me it would be an absolute catastrophe. I would certainly be interested in deserving it, but to
  receive it would be terrible. It would just complicate even more the problems of fame. The only thing I really regret in life is not having a daughter.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Daughter, Regret, Thinking

  "Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69". Interviewed with Peter H. Stone. Issue 82, p. 339, www.theparisreview.org. Winter 1981.

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• Kiev's attempts to exert economic pressure on Donbas (region of east Ukraine) and disrupt its daily life only aggravates the situation. This is a dead-end track, fraught with a big catastrophe.

  Vladimir Putin

  Life, Ukraine, Track

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• It seemed to me the basic definition of mental illness, this persistent, painful inability to simply be with someone else. It might be lifelong, or it might descend like a sudden catastrophe, this blankness between ourselves and the rest of the world. The blankness might not even be obvious to others. But on our side of that severed connection, it was hell, a life lived behind glass. The only difference between mild depression and severe schizophrenia was the amount of sound and air that seeped in.

  Tracy Thompson

  Differences, Glasses, Air

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• I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space.

  Gabe Newell

  Thinking, Space, Kind

  "Valve’s Gabe Newell discusses the frontiers of gaming, from wearable technology to 'tongue controllers'". Interview with Ed Fries, venturebeat.com. July 25, 2012.

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• The loss of India would mark and consummate the downfall of the British Empire. That great organism would pass at a stroke out of life into history.From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery.

  Lord Randolph Churchill

  Recovery, Loss, India

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• Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

  David Deutsch

  Stars, Optimism, People

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• When the news first came that Japan had attacked us my first feeling was of relief that ... a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed.

  Henry L. Stimson

  War, Japan, People

  Henry L. Stimson (2016). “On Active Services In Peace And War”, p.262, Read Books Ltd

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• In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’ . . . We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

  Peter Thiel

  Fate, Technology, Our World

  "The Education of a Libertarian". www.cato-unbound.org. April 13, 2009.

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• I perfectly understand the particular attention which you pay to the question of nuclear energy, and fully realize the possible dangers and catastrophes which might result for mankind from an irresponsible attitude. In this field my wish is for Iran to put all her efforts towards the peaceful use of atomic energy. We shall continue to co-operate with all the nations of the world to attain this end in the interests of human society.

  Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

  Attitude, Iran, Effort

  Message to the White House in April 1977. "The Shah's Story". Book by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, pp. 67-68, 1980.

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• A famous anecdote concerning Cuvier involves the tale of his visitation from the devil—only it was not the devil but one of his students dressed up with horns on his head and shoes shaped like cloven hooves. This frightening apparition burst into Cuvier's bedroom when he was fast asleep and claimed:
  'Wake up thou man of catastrophes. I am the Devil. I have come to devour you!'
  Cuvier studied the apparition carefully and critically said,
  'I doubt whether you can. You have horns and hooves. You eat only plants.

  Georges Cuvier

  Men, Shoes, Doubt

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