Barbara Tuchman Quotes

n case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died - an entire town destroyed.

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

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

Public calamity is a mighty leveller.

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.

What opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction,but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.

Ten thousand people died, an entire town destroyed.

Quite clearly this is a human disaster of enormous proportions. We have tens and tens of thousands of displaced people across the United States,.

I'm planning a catastrophe.

So many awful things have happened in Karachi, it's true. It has its own crazy rhythm. Even as crazy as other news is in Pakistan, the city manages to beat that in the frequency of catastrophes.

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

I'll never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.

Hurricane Katrina this past week was certainly the worst episode in what has become an all-too-familiar and tragic cycle, and our nation is now faced with a set of unprecedented challenges.

First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images.

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.

When you have the worst disaster in American history, you've got to be attuned to expectations,.

The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately. And I don't think we want to speculate on the number of casualties. The effort now has to be to save as many people as possible.

One sound blow will serve to undo us all.

CALAMITY, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience.

When the flood cometh it sweepeth away grain as well as chaff.

I think a tragedy is something where the natural order of things is completely interrupted and doesn't right itself.