Catastrophe Quotes

“[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.… Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.… They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“This is the time we have to walk stepping on the storm.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. Whoever realises this will do cleaner work one way or the other.

Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms - around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance - evoke both fear and Titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.

The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

“It's a blip, not a catastrophe.”
― Donald Trump

“لا يوجد داع للقلق أو للتشاؤم فالكوارث الحقيقية تأتي عادة بدون مقدمات”
― عمر طاهر, أقوال برما

“It was like we had known all along that the sky was going to fall and then it fell and we pretended to be surprised.”
― Elin Hilderbrand, The Love Season

“Now you understand how people like us work?”
“I believe so.”
“Tell me.”
“You work in horrible conditions and—”
“No! We work in our graves.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“Sometimes, to do wrong deeds, one's intentions don't have to be bad; unfavorable timing and circumstances might lead one to do so.”
― Sanu Sharma, विप्लवी [Biplavi]

“Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.”
― Andrew Solomon

“Be proactive not reactive, for an apparently insignificant issue ignored today can spawn tomorrow's catastrophe.”
― Ken Poirot

“कहिलेकाहीँ गलत गर्नलाई नियत बिग्रिरहन पर्दैन, समय र परिस्थिति बिग्रिएको हुनुपर्छ ।”
― Sanu Sharma, विप्लवी [Biplavi]

“Each year
it just keeps getting hotter and hotter
and
the heat keeps getting more intense.

And this time it's our responsibility
(even if it's God's retribution
for destroying their planet).
Whether or not you yourself made it happen,
we are responsible to change it.
We're the only ones who can.”
― Shellen Lubin

“…catastrophe eclipses everything.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Handling the Undead

“On closer inspection, this cruel and beautiful world is ours, and we are all completely alone and doomed.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“Supongo que no hay manera de hacer regresar la nube con forma de hongo a esa bonita y reluciente esfera de uranio.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Sometimes I find myself in the eye of my own hurricane.… He was trouble in my life interrupting my world crashing into my dreams but I was a fucking storm the lightening to his thunder so, what more could a little chaos add but a beautiful catastrophic eruption.”
― Melody Lee, Vine: Book of Poetry

“Despairing of an aim, salvation or an ideal, we invent for ourselves the easiest solution: happiness.
Here again we begin with utopia - the ideal of happiness - and end in achieved happiness, the highest stage of happiness. The same abreaction to integral happiness as to integral
reality or freedom: these are all unbearable.
In the end, it is the opposite form of misfortune, the victim ideology, that triumphs.
Being incapable of accepting thought (the idea that the world thinks us, the intelligence of evil), we invent the easiest solution, the technical solution: Artificial Intelligence.
The highest stage of intelligence: integral knowledge.
This time the rejection will arise perhaps from a resistance on the part of things themselves to their digital transparency or from a failure of the system in the form of a major accident.
Against all the sovereign hypotheses are ranged the easiest solutions.
And all the easiest solutions lead to catastrophe.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“Yet the greatest tragedy of the twenty-first century may be that we have learned so little from the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. Apparently catastrophe lessons need to be experienced firsthand by each generation. So, here are some refreshers: Nuclear conflict may mean the end of life on this planet. Mass dehumanization can lead to genocide. The death of an independent press can lead to tyranny and render a population helpless to protect itself against a government that disdains law and conscience.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Catastrophe fortifies integrity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Abigitano: El Divino Refugiado

“Trust is damaging, blind trust is catastrophic !”
― Malar

“There’s not really any bad news in nature. What we call catastrophe, to nature, is just neutral. Preston always said that if you can’t find the space to get to love, even towards yourself, at least be neutral. Everything else’ll just make you sick, and turn you into that thing you don’t understand or don’t wanna be.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“L’homme est ainsi fait que, quand il ne voit pas de nuage, il a besoin d’en trouver un pour se rassurer. S’il ne voit pas un malheur s’avancer, il se dit que la prochaine catastrophe, pour être aussi bien dissimulée, elle sera d’ampleur, aussi vaut-il mieux tout de suite œuvrer à mettre des nuages dans le ciel, des nuages qu’on connaît, ce n’est pas d’aujourd’hui qu’on meurt de faim ou noyé ou lépreux ou bombardé à travers le monde, mais le soleil, allez savoir ce que ça cache, d’ailleurs si on le regarde en face, ça rend aveugle, c’est bien la preuve.”
― Fabien Marechal, Dernier avis avant démolition

“A virus is a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news.”
― Peter Medawar

“There is a six-forked path ahead of us. Each path represents a possible future and a major paradigm shift for humanity. But we must act now. In 1924, Winston Churchill said, ‘The prevention of the supreme catastrophe ought to be the paramount object of all endeavor.’ History shows us what happens when we avoid, appease, and procrastinate while the seeds of that epic catastrophe grow stronger by the day.”
― J.J. Wisdom, G.A.I.A.: A World on the Brink in the Age of A.I.

“Catastrophe can be a course correction.”
― Xóchitl González, Anita de Monte Laughs Last

“She never could resist watching someone hurtling headlong into catastrophe.”
― Ada Moncrieff, Murder at Maybridge Castle

“While “Religion is Masses Opiate”, if it is consumed in excess or masses are produced in excess, it can have catastrophic impact on the Humanity itself.”
― Sandeep Sahajpal, The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be!

“Tamper with Biology’s delicate balance, and you reap the whirlwind. For aeons Nature bore the heavy lifting, evolving a perfect, watch-spring equilibrium—until upstart humanity emerged from the primal soup, armed with ego and reason, to overrule every precedent. We know how the merest tipping of the ecological scales will unleash catastrophe, yet we persist blind—Earth’s self-anointed judge, jury, and executioner—refusing to humble ourselves before Nature’s Supreme Court verdict.”
― Stewart Stafford

“[...] that's what a global catastrophe means for anyone: it's not the loss of the world at large you mourn, it's the loss of *your* world, your life, your [...]”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends