Catastrophe Quotes - Page 7

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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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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History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe.

Frank Herbert

Race, History, Invention

Frank Herbert (2008). “God Emperor of Dune”, p.352, Penguin

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There's a difference between just gaining access to a commodity as opposed to a spirit that allows us to live a life of love and justice, that when crisis and catastrophe hits you, that the biggest mansion in the world is not going to help you. If you don't have anybody who loves you, if you don't have any God who cares for you, that you're not going to have what it takes to move to the next stage in your life.

Cornel West

Love You, Moving, Differences

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

Anna Quindlen

Loss, Beloved

Anna Quindlen (2012). “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake”, p.162, Random House

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Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to the light of judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets.

Lewis H. Lapham

Light, Fire, Vanity

Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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For similar folly, our own country, in the transition from the colonial period, also paid a fearful price; and from a like catastrophe the United States has been twice saved in our time by the arguments formulated by Turgot.

Andrew Dickson White

Country, United States, Transition

ANDREW DICKSON WHITE (1910). “SEVEN GREAT STATESMEN IN THE WARFARE OF HUMANITY WITH UNREASON”

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I believe that Chess possesses a magic that is also a help in advanced age. A rheumatic knee is forgotten during a game of chess and other events can seem quite unimportant in comparison with a catastrophe on the chessboard.

Vlastimil Hort

Believe, Games, Chess Game

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It's hard to find a reason that is not environmentally centered, that [doesn't have] something to do with global warming or what the planet is going through. The amount of tornadoesit's like three times the highest amount ever before, right? Something weird is happening with all of these natural catastrophes.

Rosie O'Donnell

Three, Global Warming, Reason

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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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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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Obama sounded like Al Gore on global warming. The more the case for man-made warming falls apart, the more hysterical Gore gets about an imminent catastrophe. The more public support his stimulus bill loses, the more Obama embraces fear-mongering.

Fred Barnes

Fall, Men, Fear Mongering

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Carrying on as usual carries enormous risks, condemning today's students to a world of constant insecurity and frequent catastrophes.

William H. Calvin

Insecurity, Risk, Usual

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Humanity cannot afford to muddle through the rest of the twentieth century; the risks are too great, and the stakes are too high. This may be the last opportunity to choose our own and our descendants’ destiny. Failing to choose or making the wrong choices may lead to catastrophe. But it must never be forgotten that the right choices could lead to a much better world.

John Holdren

Opportunity, Destiny, Choices

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Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.

Al Gore

Epic, Years, Weather

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As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.

Peter Sloterdijk

Reading, Writing, Long

Peter Sloterdijk (2014). “You Must Change Your Life”, p.443, John Wiley & Sons

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Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

P. D. James

Eye, Mass Extinction, Light

P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.24, Vintage

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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Susan Sontag

Taken, Population, Awareness

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That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.

Andrew Solomon

Suicide, Loss, Essence

Andrew Solomon (2014). “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas Of Depression”, p.265, Simon and Schuster

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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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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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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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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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