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Accident Quotes

Browse 113 quotes about Accident.

Accident Quotes

“Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.”

“At the end of it all, it is our relationship with people that will determine whether they will share in our pain if we fall into dangers.”

“Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi”

“Valujet flight 592 crashed after takeoff from Miami airport because oxygen generators in its cargo hold caught fire. The generators had been loaded onto the airplane by employees of a maintenance contractor, who were subsequently prosecuted. The editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology “strongly believed the failure of SabreTech employees to put caps on oxygen generators constituted willful negligence that led to the killing of 110 passengers and crew. Prosecutors were right to bring charges. There has to be some fear that not doing one’s job correctly could lead to prosecution.”13 But holding individuals accountable by prosecuting them misses the point. It shortcuts the need to learn fundamental lessons, if it acknowledges that fundamental lessons are there to be learned in the first place. In the SabreTech case, maintenance employees inhabited a world of boss-men and sudden firings, and that did not supply safety caps for expired oxygen generators. The airline may have been as inexperienced and under as much financial pressure as people in the maintenance organization supporting it. It was also a world of language difficulties—not only because many were Spanish speakers in an environment of English engineering language: “Here is what really happened. Nearly 600 people logged work time against the three Valujet airplanes in SabreTech’s Miami hangar; of them 72 workers logged 910 hours across several weeks against the job of replacing the ‘expired’ oxygen generators—those at the end of their approved lives. According to the supplied Valujet work card 0069, the second step of the seven-step process was: ‘If the generator has not been expended install shipping cap on the firing pin.’ This required a gang of hard-pressed mechanics to draw a distinction between canisters that were ‘expired’, meaning the ones they were removing, and canisters that were not ‘expended’, meaning the same ones, loaded and ready to fire, on which they were now expected to put nonexistent caps. Also involved were canisters which were expired and expended, and others which were not expired but were expended. And then, of course, there was the simpler thing—a set of new replacement canisters, which were both unexpended and unexpired.”14 These were conditions that existed long before the Valujet accident, and that exist in many places today. Fear of prosecution stifles the flow of information about such conditions. And information is the prime asset that makes a safety culture work. A flow of information earlier could in fact have told the bad news. It could have revealed these features of people’s tasks and tools; these longstanding vulnerabilities that form the stuff that accidents are made of. It would have shown how ‘human error’ is inextricably connected to how the work is done, with what resources, and under what circumstances and pressures.”

“Blame and the punishment that follows may satisfy the thirst for vengeance. But we cannot punish and learn at the same time. Punishment keeps in place the belief that the system is safe and the human error was the aberration. Learning requires recognizing the failures built into the system and changing the system. Punishment has nothing to do with prevention.”

“The Voyager We are all lonely voyagers sailing on life's ebb tide, To a far off place were all stripling warriors have died, Sometime at eve when the tide is low, The voices call us back to the rippling water's flow, Even though our boat sailed with love in our hearts, Neither our dreams or plans would keep heaven far apart, We drift through the hush of God's twilight pale, With no response to our friendly hail, We raise our sails and search for majestic light, While finding company on this journey to the brighten our night, Then suddenly he pulls us through the reef's cutting sea, Back to the place that he asked us to be, Friendly barges that were anchored so sweetly near, In silent sorrow they drop their salted tears, Shall our soul be a feast of kelp and brine, The wasted tales of wishful time, Are we a fish on a line lured with bait, Is life the grind, a heartless fate, Suddenly, "HUSH", said the wind from afar, Have you not looked to the heavens and seen the new star, It danced on the abyss of the evening sky, The sparkle of heaven shining on high, Its whisper echoed on the ocean's spray, From the bow to the mast they heard him say, "Hope is above, not found in the deep, I am alive in your memories and dreams when you sleep, I will greet you at sunset and with the moon's evening smile, I will light your path home.. every last lonely mile, My friends, have no fear, my work was done well, In this life I broke the waves and rode the swell, I found faith in those that I called my crew, My love will be the compass that will see you through, So don't look for me on the ocean's floor to find, I've never left the weathered docks of your loving mind, For I am in the moon, the wind and the whale's evening song, I am the sailor of eternity whose voyage is not gone.”

“This was his first trip on the Ossifar Distana, his first real splash in life. Look what it got him. Mister Smiff liked anonymity. He kept a low profile, often traveling under assumed names, claiming to be anything from a banker to a (very) successful life insurance salesman. He’d never broken the law, at least not irreparably. He was quite generous, well liked, sponsoring many charities anonymously – which is why it was so surprising to find him floating face down in the private spa in his apartment, murdered. He had been murdered, unless it was a freak shaving accident. Those old razors weren’t called cut-throats for nothing. Yikes.”

“There was death at the beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl’s dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered. The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a half hour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window. There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.”

“When I threw the stick at Jamie, I hadn't intended to hit him with it. But the moment it left my hand, I knew that's what was going to happen. I didn't yet know any calculus or geometry, but I was able to plot, with some degree of certainty, the trajectory of that stick. The initial velocity, the acceleration, the impact. The mathematical likelihood of Jamie's bloody cheek. It had good weight and heft, that stick. It felt nice to throw. And it looked damn fine in the overcast sky, too, flying end over end, spinning like a heavy, two-pronged pinwheel and (finally, indifferently, like math) connecting with Jamie's face. Jamie's older sister took me by the arm and she shook me. Why did you do that? What were you thinking? The anger I saw in her eyes. Heard in her voice. The kid I became to her then, who was not the kid I thought I was. The burdensome regret. I knew the word "accident" was wrong, but I used it anyway. If you throw a baseball at a wall and it goes through a window, that is an accident. If you throw a stick directly at your friend and it hits your friend in the face, that is something else. My throw had been something of a lob and there had been a good distance between us. There had been ample time for Jamie to move, but he hadn't moved. There had been time for him to lift a hand and protect his face from the stick, but he hadn't done that either. He just stood impotent and watched it hit him. And it made me angry: That he hadn't tried harder at a defense. That he hadn't made any effort to protect himself from me. What was I thinking? What was he thinking? I am not a kid who throws sticks at his friends. But sometimes, that's who I've been. And when I've been that kid, it's like I'm watching myself act in a movie, reciting somebody else's damaging lines. Like this morning, over breakfast. Your eyes asking mine to forget last night's exchange. You were holding your favorite tea mug. I don't remember what we were fighting about. It doesn't seem to matter any more. The words that came out of my mouth then, deliberate and measured, temporarily satisfying to throw at the bored space between us. The slow, beautiful arc. The spin and the calculated impact. The downward turn of your face. The heavy drop in my chest. The word "accident" was wrong. I used it anyway.”

“Accident - A statistical inevitability. Some nuclear power plants are built on fault lines, but ever mine, dam, oil rig, and waste dump is founded upon a tacit acceptance of the worst-case scenario. One a long enough timeline, everything that can go wrong will, however small the likelihood is from one day to the next. The responsible parties may wring their hands about the Fukushima meltdown - and the Gult of Mexico oil spill, and the Exxon Valdez, and Hurricane Katrina, and Chernobyl, and Haiti - but accident is no accident.”

“This was a normal town once, and we were normal people. Most of us worked at the plastics factory on the outskirts of town. Then one day there was an accident... something escaped from the factory, a yellow gas. It floated over the town so fast that we didn't see it, didn't realize... and then it was too late, and Dark Falls wasn't a normal town anymore.”

“L'automobile coûte chaque année dix fois plus d'hommes aux U.S.A. que la guerre du Vietnam, autant qu'une guerre mondiale ; et comme la guerre, la bagnole tue d'abord les jeunes : dans les pays développés, elle est la première cause de mortalité entre dix-huit et trente ans. Imagine-t-on la S.N.C.F. ou Air-France présentant un bilan annuel, sans cesse accru, de douze mille tués et cent mille blessés ? Plus personne n'oserait prendre le train ou l'avion, et le peuple indigné mettrait le feu au ministère des Transports.”

“La clase de errores que causan los accidentes de avión suelen ser invariablemente de trabajo en equipo y de comunicación. Un piloto sabe algo importante y por algún motivo no se lo dice al otro. Un piloto hace algo mal y el otro piloto no se percata del error. Hay que resolver una situación difícil dando una compleja serie de pasos, y por alguna razón los pilotos no logran coordinarse y olvidan uno de los pasos.”