#catastrophe

It was like we had known all along that the sky was going to fall and then it fell and we pretended to be surprised. ↗

— Elin Hilderbrand

#surprise #love

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers? ↗

— Jean Anouilh

#catastrophes #exclusively #fabulous #happens #inheritances

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#catastrophes #fiction #fiction writers #foresee #inevitable

Rulers do not reduce taxes to be kind. Expediency and greed create high taxation, and normally it takes an impending catastrophe to bring it down. ↗

— Charles Adams

#bring #catastrophe #create #down #expediency

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things. ↗

— Ernest Dimnet

#catastrophes #destructive #errors #fatal #great

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. ↗

— Cornel West

#brown #catastrophe #complex #discourse #ghettos

Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. Whoever realises this will do cleaner work one way or the other. Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms - around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance - evoke both fear and Titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe. The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#catastrophe #human-perfection #technical-perfection #technology #titanism

History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe. ↗

— Jules Romains

#category #history #human #phenomena #tends

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#await #awareness #because #been #catastrophes

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#catastrophe #changing #described #heading #history