Disaster Quotes - Page 24

• All students of disaster movies know that nothing survives these natural onslaughts except cats and the highest paid film stars.

  Simon Jenkins

  Stars, Cat, Students

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• Disaster movies do us the psychological service of forcing a quick march through the worst that could happen. At the end we see that you win a few, you lose a few, some cars are up in trees, and only the most attractive of the young people have survived.

  Frederica Mathewes-Green

  Winning, People, Car

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• A fish is free as long as it stays in the water. If it suddenly declares that it wants its freedom to fly in the air like a bird, disaster occurs. A train is free as long as it stays on the track. However, if it demands freedom to take off down a major highway, the result is destruction and devastation. We too can only experience true freedom in its fullest if we remain within the framework of freedom. Often this requires accepting responsibility and practicing discipline.

  Gigi Graham

  Responsibility, Air, Discipline

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• Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.

  Thomas Sowell

  Government, Media, Practice

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• Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.

  Stewart Brand

  Environmental, World, Poverty

  Stewart Brand (2010). “Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, RestoredWildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary”, p.41, Penguin

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• The Obama administration seems to be following what might be called 'the Detroit pattern increasing taxes, harassing businesses, and pandering to unions. In the short run, it got mayors re-elected. In the long-run, it reduced Detroit from a thriving city to an economic disaster area, whose population was cut in half, as its most productive citizens fled.

  Thomas Sowell

  Running, Cutting, Cities

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• Only dramatic cuts in the federal deficit, a rollback of regulations that cripple small and community banks, a cancellation of future tax increase plans, a big reduction in federal spending, repeal of Obamacare, freeing manufacturing from the prospect of carbon taxation and unleashing out domestic energy potential can solve our problems. But Obama is not about to undo his legacy of disaster for the American people.

  Dick Morris

  Cutting, Obamacare, People

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• If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

  Clayton Christensen

  Roots, Over You, Causes

  Harvard Business Review, Michael D. Watkins, Clayton Christensen, Kenneth L. Kraemer (2015). “Harvard Business Review Leadership Library: The Executive Collection (12 Books)”, Harvard Business Review Press

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• At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You've got denial, you've got everything in the world. You've got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely.

  Charlie Munger

  Smart, Dumb, Acquisition

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• When you're going with a huge dramatic disaster film, try to keep the narrative as simple as possible.

  Jeremy Bolt

  Simple, Trying, Narrative

  Source: collider.com

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• When politics is elevated over business, economic disaster follows.

  James Cook

  Economic

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• Do we really want the people who created $40 trillion of unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare in charge of our health care? Faceless bureaucrats, power-lusting politicians, and people spending other people's money are a recipe for disaster.

  Ed Crane

  People, Lust, Want

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• Many LBOs are man-made disasters. When the price paid is excessive, the equity portion of an LBO is really an out-of-the-money call option. Many fiduciaries placed large amounts of the capital under their stewardship into such options in 2006 and 2007.

  Seth Klarman

  Men, Stewardship, Made

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• You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.

  Charlie Munger

  School, Earth, Arguing

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• The hedge fund known as "Long Term Capital Management" collapsed last fall through overconfidence in its highly leveraged methods, despite I.Q.'s of its principals that must have averaged 160. Smart people aren't exempt from professional disasters from overconfidence. Often, they just run aground in the more difficult voyages they choose, relying on their self-appraisals that they have superior talents and methods.

  Charlie Munger

  Running, Smart, Fall

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• Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.

  Stephen Hawking

  War, Thinking, Race

  "Stephen Hawking Urges Human Colonization of Other Planets". www.foxnews.com. June 13, 2006.

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• He [Hitler] seemed very depressed and upset about the Stalingrad disaster. He said that one is always liable to look on the black side of things after a defeat, a tendency which can lead one into dangerous and false conclusions.

  Erwin Rommel

  Upset, Black, Looks

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• It's just odd that something as essential in life as sex has been flattened out in mainstream cinema - and in art cinema. Even in art movies, sex always seems to be treated negatively. Why does it always end in disaster?

  John Cameron Mitchell

  Art, Sex, Essentials

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• I believe that FEMA plays a key role in working with states and localities to prepare for and respond to natural disasters. As president, I will ensure FEMA has the funding it needs to fulfill its mission.

  Mitt Romney

  Believe, Play, Keys

  "Romney Answers the FEMA Question. Kind Of." by Josh Voorhees, www.slate.com. November 1, 2012.

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• In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.

  Charlie Munger

  Competition, Fields, Intense

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• This is an amazingly sound place. We are more disaster-resistant than most other places. We haven't pushed it as hard as other people would have pushed it. I don't want to go back to Go. I've been to Go. A lot of our shareholders have a majority of their net worth in Berkshire, and they don't want to go back to Go either.

  Charlie Munger

  People, Majority, Sound

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• The role of the board is advice and consent. If the CEO does not lay out a clear strategy and tries to get the board to set one, it will usually end in disaster.

  Sam Altman

  Advice, Trying, Doe

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• I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.

  Terence McKenna

  Thinking, Government, Extinction

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• It is always too late, or too little, or both. And that is the road to disaster.

  David Lloyd George

  Too Late, Littles, Late

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• Rand`s [Paul] a libertarian. He has a view of the world that I don`t share. He said that we shouldn`t have any troops in Iraq. He agreed with Obama that was a disaster. When there was a chance to do something constructive about Syria with a no-fly zone, he said we don`t need one.

  Barack Obama

  Iraq, Views, Libertarian

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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