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Disasters Quotes

Browse 45 quotes about Disasters.

Disasters Quotes

“Faced with the prospect of a black depression, Highsmith once again retreated into fantasy, dreaming about an affair with the actress Anne Meacham, whose picture she had seen in a magazine publicising her role in the Tennessee Williams' play, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. After the disasters of recent years, she reckoned that the safest option was to escape into romantic imagination. She reviewed her failures over the past five years and concluded that 'the moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person'.”

“Natural disasters happen from time to time but poverty happens all the time and therefore poverty is the greatest tragedy, it is the greatest disaster of mankind!”

“I noticed that volcanoes, earthquakes and floods, though are not good events, they are better than the silence of good people when bad people take the podium. The latter are to an extent uncontrollable, but the former can be stopped.”

“Any of them could have a disaster before the school year is over. You could have a disaster an hour from now. Bending over. Something could hit you. People carry guns in glove compartments and lunch boxes. Cars spin out of control in minor drizzle. The more you know, really, the more you have to worry and fret about. It's a miracle anyone can sleep at all.”

“Let me summarise our delicate position in this universe: Our every word can be our last word; our every look can be our last look! Our every moment can be our last moment! Are we happy about this fragile situation? No! Are we going to deceive ourselves with some childish stories, in other words with religion? No! Then what are we going to do? We will change this desperate situation, we will strike this chaotic universe with human mind, with high intelligence, in short with science! Humanity’s ultimate objective is to reshape this dangerous universe so that no threat will ever remain for our existence!”

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.”

“As noted in Chapter 4, there’s abundant evidence that presidents use their disaster-declaration authority under the Stafford Act to aid their own reelection prospects. Presidents direct more disaster relief to politically important states and declare more disasters in election years—and the average number of yearly disaster declarations has been increasing over time.35 Bill Clinton still holds the election-year record, with 75 disaster declarations in 1996; George W. Bush came in a close second in 2004, and has declared disasters at a faster rate overall than Clinton.”

“At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.”

“The hospital was a microcosm of these larger failures, with comprised physical infrastructure, compromised operating systems, and compromised individuals. And also instances of heroism. The scenario was familiar to students of mass disasters around the world. Systems always failed. The official response was always unconscionably slow. Coordination and communication were particularly bad. These were truths Americans had come to accept about other people's disasters. It was shocking to see the scenario play out at home.”

“A locomotive whistle was a matter of some personal importance to a railroad engineer. It was tuned and worked (even "played") according to his own personal choosing. The whistle was part of the make-up of the man; he was known for it as much as he was known for the engine he drove. And aside from its utilitarian functions, it could also be an instrument of no little amusement. Many an engineer could get a simple tune out of his whistle, and for those less musical it could be used to aggravate a cranky preacher in the middle of his Sunday sermon or to signal hello through the night to a wife or lady friend. But there was no horseplay about tying down the cord. A locomotive whistle going without letup meant one thing on the railroad, and to everyone who lived near the railroad. It meant there was something very wrong. The whistle of John Hess' engine had been going now for maybe five minutes at most. It was not on long, but it was the only warning anyone was to hear, and nearly everyone in East Conemaugh heard it and understood almost instantly what it meant.”

“In business or in politics, responsibility without authority is any chief executive’s worst nightmare. That was the political nightmare that gripped the Bush administration in the weeks after Katrina. As the National Post’s Colby Cosh put it, ‘‘The 49 percent of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator.’’93 Small wonder, then, that President Bush promptly sought the authority to head off future political disasters by overriding the decisions of state and local officials and using the military at home.”

“Everyone in the city remembers the day the floodwater drained out, differently. Some were relieved, some were still in shock, some continued to look for loved ones, while others came home to devastation. But for almost all of us it was heartbreak. The city wore its defeat for days and nights on end. For a week after the floods, on the footpaths outside most homes were stinking piles of mattresses, pillows, quilts, cushions, straw mats, bedsheets and swollen rotting wood and food grains, and cars left open, even as the sun came down hard on us, making a mockery of it all.”

“I've always been proud of how much my daughter cared about the world. After school she’d study the news, comb the internet for disasters, wars and hate and injustice, write it all down in these color-coded journals. Once, I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was just trying to keep track of it all because it didn’t seem like anybody else noticed or cared that we kept making the same mistakes, that hate in a neighborhood or injustice in a state ran like poison through veins, until another ice shelf collapsed or another animal went extinct. Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.”