Quotes About Disaster

You may well be right, and disaster may well come, I had told him. But for me it will always be a point of honour to go on working to prevent disaster, if only to make certain it is the right kind of disaster life needs when it does ultimately come.

Hillary Clinton has been a disaster as a senator. A disaster.

The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster When you take your pill it's like a mine disaster. I think of all the people lost inside you.

And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.

Sometimes it's good to not be able to buy everything, because then it gives you something to look forward to. That's why you shouldn't give kids too much - then they have nothing to look forward to. It's a recipe for disaster. What if you have a daughter and you give her everything and then she marries someone who can't give her everything? A recipe for disaster.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Everyday life is a disaster, and disaster can liberate us.

Alas, I emerge from one disaster to fall into a worse.

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment-not discouragement-you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars...The stakes are immense, the task colossal the time is short. But we may hope- we must hope- that man's own creation, man's own genius, will not destroy him.

Within a capitalist corporation, someone says, "Lend me a wrench," and someone asks, "Yeah, what do I get?" You assume that the idea of each according to his or her abilities, each according to his or her needs - in solving a problem - is actually the only thing that works. And in situations of disaster, there are often communistic notions of improvisation, where you basically exchange hierarchies and all of a sudden all those things that are luxuries that you can't afford, you have them in an emergency.

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

How impossible it is for us to imagine ourselves victims of disaster. We suffer for the poor people who were thrown into the sea from their cruise ship off the coast of Tuscany, some losing their lives. Imagine a world of accelerating natural disasters, one after the other so that nobody can help anyone else.

Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.

I'd say that it's often true that people are attracted to each other immediately and everything lines up, but it's just as true for those relationships to end up a disaster. But people don't think of that as false love-at-first-sight. They highlight the examples that worked rather than the ones that failed.

For most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us, unless you believe in evolution. Actually, I take it back. The whole thing is a disaster.

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.

Once I became historically aware, I realized there are these formative moments of history tied around tragedy and disaster and sacrifice, that led people to survive and take stock and move on with some kind of notion of betterment.

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.

The only really safe thing to do is to write a diary of where you've been, what time you went to bed, what you ate. If I wrote honestly about everything I think it'd be a disaster. It would cause a lot of trouble.

I really like Barack Obama. I think that he's working very hard. He's trying to rebuild our reputation throughout the world. The previous administration was a total disaster, a total catastrophe. He was handed a pretty bad deck of cards. And I'm not saying I agree with everything he's doing. He's a champion. I mean, he won against all odds. When he first announced, people were giving him virtually no chance. And he's just done something that's amazing.

Miss Havisham is a glitch in the smooth functioning of the Patriarchy, enforcing awareness of a moment of social disaster and personal shame, something it seems she would want us to forget (but no one would forget). (Maybe an interesting "discussion question" for readers of Complicated Grief might be, "What do Terry Barton and Miss Havisham have in common?"?)

The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was in the fall of 2009 - only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules.

I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.

In recent weeks it has come to my attention that many caravans have met with disaster; they have not gotten through." I grunted wisely. "Probably ran out of water. That's the thing about deserts. Dry." "Indeed. A fascinating analysis. But survivors reaching Hebron report differently: monsters fell upon them in the wastes." "What, fell upon them in a squashed-them kind of way?" "More the leaped-out-and-slew-them kind. (...)

There are two things in New York, euphoria and disaster.

I am a PR disaster because I talk too much.

I think it is very difficult for somebody who campaigned to stay in, who thinks there will be disaster if we leave and so on to suddenly turn it around and start believing that we can make a go of it.

Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.

A first hint of the power of the electronic media to bring disaster directly into living rooms came with the radio broadcast of the explosion of the zeppelin "Hindenburg," in 1937 . . .

Success is the ability to continue to move through total disaster.

Experience taught me that working families are often just one pay check away from economic disaster. And it showed me first-hand the importance of every family having access to good health care.

But fear - panic - knows no reason. It brings into being overnight the things that it fears. It is the greatest torment of humanity. Fear is, in short, the devil. It causes most of the sin, disaster, disease and misery of the world. It is the ravening lion roaming the earth seeking whom it may...devour. The only refuge is in the knowledge that it has no power other than the power you give it.

It never occurred to me that we would have as grandiose a program as the Marshall Plan, but I felt that we had to do something to save Europe from economic disaster which would encourage the Communist takeover.

Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due

There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.

This may sound trite, but bad things happen to good people, and when you're facing terrorism, natural disaster, you can have every wonderful plan in place, but I am a realist.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?

Billions of taxpayers' money has been wasted in bad deals. The London Underground modernisation, personally negotiated by one of Gordon Brown's team, was a disaster, as the National Audit Office has confirmed.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person's life. God is in everyone's life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else - God is in this person's life. You can - you must - try to seek God in every human life.

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

I thought the Bush economic policy was a disaster. We lost 500,000 private sector jobs during his tenure.

The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it's austerity in the midst of recession and that's guaranteed to be a disaster. There's some resistance to that now. In the US, it's essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration.

There are three kinds of people who run toward disaster, not away: cops, firemen and reporters.

A war is going to destroy our economy even further. It's going to be a threefold humanitarian disaster.