Edmund Burke Quotes

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

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.

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.

Disaster can take a nation by surprise, slowly, and then all at once.

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

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

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.

For me there is a vital connection between the Bihar calamity and the untouchability campaign.

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.

Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city.

Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.

I remember when I was in Los Angeles, and there was one of the very big earthquakes, and it was just absolute pandemonium. I mean the streets were just - people were crashing into each other, people were looting, in just a very short amount of time.

Disasters impel a nation to rise

In the pandemonium of the crisis in New Orleans, somehow getting people on busses took priority over keeping them alive.

There are disasters that happen - Hurricane Harvey came up, and you had people self-organizing through the community and getting in boats and driving around rescuing people coordinated ad hoc through this network. That's not a media function.

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.

Ten thousand people died, an entire town destroyed.

I'm planning a catastrophe.

The whole world's on fire.

Those who have not undergone minor disasters are usually being held in reserve for something major

Many feel that sitting at a screen sweating over the design of handrail details for the next cute downtown boutique hotel just doesn't make sense when more than 150,000 people have lost their lives, more than five million people have been made homeless and whole towns have been swept away.

When disaster waves, I try not to wave back.

A world is in flames, and you are cracking silly jokes.

Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.

This visit is meant to express my closeness to our brothers and sisters who endured the suffering, loss and devastation caused by Typhoon Yolanda. Together with many people throughout the world, I have admired the heroic strength, faith and resilience demonstrated by so many Filipinos in the face of this natural disaster, and so many others.