Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

I think this is going to be a black day in the history of mankind.

War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can't miss it.

We have witnessed the most extraordinary devastation. The magnitude of the situation is unbelievable. It's just heartbreaking.

If the death and disaster that now fall upon innocent people through the year and over our country as a whole were concentrated into one calamity, we would shudder at the tremendous catastrophe. The loss is no less disastrous because diffused in time and space.

In 1874, Mary Fraser accompanied her husband Hugh to Hong Kong, arriving hours after a typhoon had wrecked the island. Some 10,000 boat families had drowned in the harbour. There was no way to avoid the bloated bodies, and when Mary disembarked, she felt her foot land on something soft.

Near the gates and within two cities there will be scourges the like of which was never seen: famine within plague, people put out by steel, crying to the great immortal God for relief.

We imagine 'the end' as a world-devastating event, but every time there's a terrible earthquake, a tsunami, an outbreak of disease - that's apocalyptic, on a micro-scale.

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.

The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

So, you wrecked Alcatraz Island, made Mount St. Helens explode, and displaced half a million people, but at least you're safe." "Yep, that pretty much covers it.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

The first light of day today revealed what we had feared. The devastation is greater than our worst fears. It's just totally overwhelming.

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.

The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.

What is the distinction between "misfortune" and "calamity"? If Mr. Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune; but if someone pulled him out, it would be a calamity.

Every war is a national misfortune.

It was the first time I was looking, really, right after the storm, that I saw maybe the amount of devastation that had happened in the Lower Ninth Ward. Where my friends lived, which was about six blocks from where the industrial canal was, houses was smashed into houses, and there were, like, four houses smashed together.

At forty-five degrees, the sky will burn. Fire to approach the great new city; in an instant, a great scattered flame will leap up, when one will want to get evidence from the Normans.

I had four combat tours, and I never saw death on a scale like I saw in Haiti. A quarter-million people lost their lives.

I don't like to watch train wrecks.

...they came to see what happened to their town, to see if it was indeed lying burnt and bleeding. Many of them also came to die.