Catastrophe Quotes - Page 6

• 50-100 years from now we are all going to be eating a plant based diet. Whether that happens through a catastrophe or a peaceful sustainable life giving way is based on whether we make the right choices now and how we fight in this struggle together.

  Mark Bittman

  Struggle, Fighting, Years

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• I've noticed that the more flooding there is, the more bullshit gets talked. I mean it was very noticeable in the Asian tsumai. It happened around Christmas-New Year. The Muslims of Sri Lanka said 'We knew this would happen because the Christians were using alcohol for their Christmas celebrations.' The Buddhists said 'We knew this would happen because of the horrible Muslim slaughter practices.' It's amazing to see how apocalypse or catastrophe makes people behave primitively.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Christian, New Year, Buddhist

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• [On the Democratic Party:] Its leaders are always troubadors of trouble; crooners of catastrophe ... A Democratic President is doomed to proceed to his goals like a squid, squirting darkness all about him.

  Clare Boothe Luce

  Party, Squids, Goal

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• If we once and for so long lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that's overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history .

  John Zerzan

  Roots, Long, Balance

  "Take My Advice : Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two". Book by James L. Harmon, 2007.

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• Death releases the energy into air. If a true catastrophe is looming, the disturbance becomes such that a sensitive individual may become highly troubled by it. He may be aware exactly when and where it will occur. He may see an aura around people who are soon to die. Or he may see images of the disaster beforehand.

  Jed Rubenfeld

  Air, People, Energy

  Jed Rubenfeld (2011). “The Death Instinct: A Novel”, p.202, Penguin

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• Now suppose that the clue experiences that can correct the illusion become for some reason increasingly scarce – perhaps because the dominant story itself brings about their elimination! Then the illusion might go on for a very long time, might have to result in real catastrophe, before anyone realizes anything is wrong.

  Val Plumwood

  Real, Long, Stories

  Val Plumwood (2012). “The Eye of the Crocodile”, p.13, ANU E Press

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• If economic catastrophe does come, will it be a time that draws Christians together to share every resource we have, or will it drive us apart to hide in our own basements or mountain retreats, guarding at gunpoint our private stores from others? If we faithfully use our assets for his kingdom now, rather than hoarding them, can't we trust our faithful God to provide for us then?

  Randy Alcorn

  Christian, Faithful, Together

  Randy Alcorn (2011). “Money, Possessions, and Eternity”, p.517, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

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• Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience. - To realize that it's just an inconvenience, that it is not a catastrophe, but just an unpleasantness, is part of coming into your own, part of waking up.

  Bruce Lee

  Philosophy, Differences, Wake Up

  Bruce Lee (2015). “Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living”, p.120, Tuttle Publishing

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• Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

  Harold Bloom

  Dark, Past, Counter Culture

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• What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...

  Joy Williams

  Dark, People, Ordinary

  "Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223". Interview with Paul Winner, www.theparisreview.org. 2014.

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• Today we know not only that there is a terrible amount of disorder in the heavens - great catastrophes or conflagrations occur frequently - but evolution gives us a perfectly natural explanation of such order as there is. No distinguished astronomer now traces "the finger of God" in the heavens; and astronomers ought to know best.

  Joseph McCabe

  Order, Giving, Heaven

  Joseph McCabe (1929). “The Story of Religious Controversy”

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• We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly. In ancient Greek the word “chaos” means “gaping void” or “yawning emptiness.” The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.

  Werner Herzog

  Art, Mean, Yawning

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• Geologists have usually had recourse for the explanation of these changes to the supposition of sundry violent and extraordinary catastrophes, cataclysms, or general revolutions having occurred in the physical state of the earth's surface.

  George Julius Poulett Scrope

  Science, Earth, Revolution

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• Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Inflation

  Ludwig Von Mises (1990). “Economic freedom and interventionism: an anthology of articles and essays”

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• Education is a slow-moving but powerful force. It may not be fast enough or strong enough to save us from catastrophe, but it is the strongest force available for that purpose and in its proper place, therefore, is not at the periphery, but at the center of international relations.

  J. William Fulbright

  Strong, Powerful, Moving

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• Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!

  D. H. Lawrence

  Taken, Cutting, Men

  D. H. Lawrence, Michael Squires (2002). “Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'”, p.323, Cambridge University Press

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• The experience I'm talking about has given me one certainty: the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in human consciousness, nothing will change for the better, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed will be unavoidable.

  Vaclav Havel

  Lying, Heart, Responsibility

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• Want a happier, more content life? I highly recommend the down-to-earth methods you'll find in 'Mindfulness.' Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman have teamed up to give us scientifically grounded techniques we can apply in the midst of our everyday challenges and catastrophes.

  Daniel Goleman

  Giving, Challenges, Everyday

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• We human beings have not secured happiness; on the contrary, science gives us catastrophes. We are like travelers losing their way in a desert. They see a big black shadow ahead and desperately run to it, thinking it may lead them somewhere. But after running a long way, they no longer see the shadow and fall into the slough of despond. What is that shadow? It is this ""Mr. Science.

  Liang Qichao

  Running, Fall, Technology

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• Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order... catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.

  Peter Drucker

  Spiritual, Men, Order

  "he End of Economic Man". Book by Peter F. Drucker, 1939.

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• Catastrophe Theory is-quite likely-the first coherent attempt (since Aristotelian logic) to give a theory on analogy. When narrow-minded scientists object to Catastrophe Theory that it gives no more than analogies, or metaphors, they do not realise that they are stating the proper aim of Catastrophe Theory, which is to classify all possible types of analogous situations.

  Rene Thom

  Science, Giving, Analogies

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• The battle of Kursk... the forcing of the Dnieper... and the liberation of Kiev, left Hitlerite Germany facing catastrophe.

  Vasily Chuikov

  War, Battle, Kiev

  "The fall of Berlin". Book by Vasiliy Ivanovich Chuikov, 1968.

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• Many individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul will be consigned to eternal torment in the never-ending subterranean barbecue if you fail to follow the whacky edicts of one particular set of puckered dogwhistles or another. You may recall from the great movie Strange Days that a "dogwhistle" is a guy whose asshole is so tight that when he farts, only dogs can hear him.

  L. Neil Smith

  Dog, Guy, Soul

  "The Bad Guys". April 28, 2009.

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• I first came into the labor force in 1941 when the minimum wage was 40 cents an hour, and that was my first job. And each time that we've tried to boost the lower level of salary for the most underpaid workers, there have been predictions of catastrophe. But each time, in [m]y opinion, the change has helped our Nation and its economic strength.

  Jimmy Carter

  Jobs, Labor Force, Salary

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• Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image.

  Simone Weil

  Soul, Suffering, Facts

  Simone Weil (2005). “War and the Iliad”, New York Review of Books

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