You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers - because without trust, they won't fight.
Great breakthroughs are always followed by great catastrophes.
Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'
Oil is sixty dollars a barrel. There are terrorists everywhere. We have a catastrophe in our world every ten minutes. I don't know how anybody's getting through anything. Right now, people just need to be entertained.
Catastrophe and creation are twins.
Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
Man's civility is lagging behind his technological ability. It could mean disaster and catastrophe for the whole world. We're all sinners, everyone of us, and a radical change is needed for all of us.
As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.
We saw what happens with Bolsheviks. It was another catastrophe. I don't have the solution. The moviemaker can ask questions but not give solutions.
The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.
Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.
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.
Success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe.
I've noticed that the more flooding there is, the more bullshit gets talked. I mean it was very noticeable in the Asian tsumai. It happened around Christmas-New Year. The Muslims of Sri Lanka said 'We knew this would happen because the Christians were using alcohol for their Christmas celebrations. ' The Buddhists said 'We knew this would happen because of the horrible Muslim slaughter practices. ' It's amazing to see how apocalypse or catastrophe makes people behave primitively.
I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.
I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.
He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
