Catastrophe Quotes

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. (H. G. Wells)
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. View quote
Albert Einstein
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe. View quote
Iris Murdoch
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. View quote
Le Corbusier
These days, everything is magnified very quickly by the media - the slightest slip can turn into a catastrophe. View quote
Valerie Trierweiler
If left unchecked, global change will create violent conflict, torrential storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe. View quote
Valerie Jarrett
We don't want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward. View quote
David Axelrod
Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe. View quote
Germaine Greer
Washington's adventuristic policy, whipping up international tension to the utmost, is pushing mankind towards nuclear catastrophe. View quote
Konstantin Chernenko
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. View quote
James P. Cannon
In the long run, though, the greatest IT risk facing most companies is more prosaic than a catastrophe. It is, simply, overspending. IT may be a commodity, and its costs may fall rapidly enough to ensure that any new capabilities are quickly shared, but the very fact that it is entwined with so many business functions means that it will continue to consume a large portion of corporate spending. (Nicholas G. Carr)
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Simone Weil
The battle of Kursk... the forcing of the Dnieper... and the liberation of Kiev, left Hitlerite Germany facing catastrophe. View quote
Vasily Chuikov
Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience. View quote
Bruce Lee
Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have. View quote
Joshua Reynolds
We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is - on the brink of catastrophe - torn by polarizing hate and how it's a shame that we can't work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day! View quote
Jon Stewart
In our modern world, mass hunger, economic stagnation, environmental catastrophe, political instability, and terrorism cannot be quarantined within national borders. View quote
Willy Brandt
In the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne. View quote
Paul Claudel
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom. (Don DeLillo)
[In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe. View quote
Pitirim Sorokin
Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet. Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe. View quote
Pitirim Sorokin
History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe. View quote
Jules Romains
To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe. View quote
Bruce Chatwin