Catastrophe Quotes - Page 12

• A clever man reaps some benefit from the worst catastrophe, and a fool can turn even good luck to his disadvantage.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Clever, Good Luck, Men

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• 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs sparked a rising wave of consumer indignation. But...it takes a major catastrophe to carry legal and enforcement action over the hump of lethargy and inaction....Today, nearly forty years later, the situation is worse, not better.

  John Grant Fuller

  Dark, Years, Pigs

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• The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.

  Milton Friedman

  Garden, Government, Investing

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• For years I've wanted to live according to everyone else's morals. I've forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth-after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.

  Albert Camus

  Inspirational, Lying, Years

  Albert Camus (2008). “Notebooks, 1951-1959”, Ivan R Dee

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• Marcuse wrote: "Perhaps an accident may alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior of man, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change.".

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Freedom, Men, Done

  Daniel Pinchbeck (2012). “The 2012 Collection”, p.66, Penguin

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• Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations ... the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  War, Party, Thinking

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• Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Loss, Men, Order

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”

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• In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.

  Martin Rees

  Technology, Errors, Design

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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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• 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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• When I was touring with my Vladimir Putin biography, which was published all over the world, people would ask me, How come you're still there, why haven't you left? I would say, I'm staying, it's my home. He can leave! It felt very good to say that. But now - he wins. It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe. And yet he's gotten people out of the country. That's the most terrifying thing about the current situation, and for the future of the country.

  Masha Gessen

  Country, Home, Winning

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• Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.

  Yukio Mishima

  Cancer, Imagination, Caught

  Yukio Mishima, Cecilia Segawa Seigle (1974). “The temple of dawn”, Harvill Secker

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• The magic will which makes us see the other side of our natures-dream and disaster, catastrophe and fulfillment-is the great permanent challenge of humanity.

  Herbert Gold

  Dream, Challenges, Humanity

  Herbert Gold (1971). “The Magic Will: Stories & Essays”, p.50, Transaction Publishers

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• Newspapers have developed what might be called a vested interest in catastrophe. If they can spot a fight, they play up that fight. If they can uncover a tragedy, they will headline that tragedy.

  Harry Allen Overstreet

  Fighting, Play, Tragedy

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• The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.

  Daniel Botkin

  People, Historical, Our Society

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• Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi.

  James Hillman

  Moving, Ideas, Our World

  James Hillman (2006). “City and Soul: Uniform Edition”, Spring Publications

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• As the idea imparted by the term Cataclysm, Catastrophe, or Revolution, is extremely vague, and may comprehend any thing you choose to imagine, it answers for the time very well as an explanation; that is, it stops further inquiry. But it also has had the disadvantage of effectually stopping the advance of science, by involving it in obscurity and confusion.

  George Julius Poulett Scrope

  Science, Ideas, Imagination

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• Every day, it seems, a new extreme weather catastrophe happens somewhere in America, and the medias all over it, profiling the ordinary folks wiped out by forest fires, droughts, floods, massive sinkholes, tornadoes.

  Jane Velez-Mitchell

  Fire, Weather, America

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• The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of the fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on to this terrible discovery of his fundamental ignorance - he is not the measure of all things but the thing measured and found wanting.

  Robert Fagles

  Hero, Ignorance, Men

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• By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors.

  Gerald Durrell

  Children, War, Garden

  "Two in the Bush". Book by Gerald Durrell, 1966.

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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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• 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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• The humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens - very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about "humando," you're talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis.

  Cornel West

  Humility, Animal, Talking

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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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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